I am nowhere nearer to clinching this extension, yet it feels so amazing. Actually, I don’t even care whether I get selected. I feel so great right now. This comes out of doing something properly and your efforts being appreciated.

I was nervous, coz I hadn’t appeared for an interview in three years, and that can make you out of practice. The best strategy I thought was to be myself and not pretend to be someone else, coz that starts consuming so much of your brain. Warts and all, take it or leave it. Moreover, the bigger problem is the attitude which keeps yelling in the background, do better you asshole! End result is even when you have given your best, you never feel satisfied with anything that you do. Now, it might be a good strategy to go forward in life and be your biggest damned critic, but in stressful conditions, when you need to feel good about yourself, that attitude doesn’t really help. So be yourself and be more kind to yourself were the only two things I kept reminding myself.

It went well, but the great moment was when one of the interviewers said in the end that how amazed he was at how much I have done, what I have done and my presentation skills. Now, this fellow was the one who I was most stressed about coz he is an amazing scientist and always comes up with questions least expected. Plus, in my first year here, I had taken his course, and he was so so great…so I didn’t want to measure any less in front of him. Add to that, presence of my advisor in the same room, and the pressure to perform in front of him. With all this, when this guy said that about my presentation, I realized how important all this was for me. Their realizing that I have worked my ass off for 4 years, and this is just a small part of all that. And if they find this much a lot, then the thesis will more or less fare well when presented in its entirety.

The best part of the interview was when boss said that just give them an idea about the other projects you are simultaneously working on. I was not prepared about it and that made it kinda exciting. I had no supplementary thing to support my talk, so decided to use board and give them an idea about various projects I have been running simultaneously with the one that I presented and how they relate with each other in answering the bigger question on the table. Don’t really know what they thought, but the most important thing was I felt exhilarated. There was no preparation for this part of the talk and so everything was impromptu. And I think I did a good job coz they seemed really focussed on what I was saying and giving all the right reactions, nod when they need to nod, smile when need to smile. So everything was great.

After all this, it might not be such a boring idea to teach. I always felt teaching is a big bore, and that’s because I always thought it’s so predictable. Year after year you teach more or less the same things, your punchlines are the same, your jokes are the same, your conclusions are the same, where’s the bloody excitement? But maybe it’s up to me to make it interesting for myself…Let’s see.