interviewee.

I remember when I was looking for a job a little over two years ago in the months leading up to my college graduation. I was discouraged. I'd not been job hunting before, but I found the task not to my liking. It seems like I spent hours pouring over job sites, trying to find jobs in my target region that I was qualified for. Finding none of those, I applied to jobs in my target region for which I was grossly unqualified. Having no luck with those, I started pelting companies as far away as Kansas City with my resume, figuring I'd just get back to my Kansas roots. I despaired that I somehow did not know the right things, and I sent off resume after resume into the black hole that is the internet, never hearing even so much as a "Yeah, right."

You know, not much has changed.

I did all of those things again. Even though I had just spent a couple of years working in the industry, again, I did not learn the right things. I was looking at taking classes so that I could finally learn the stupid right things, but thankfully some poor personnel managers took pity on me and gave me some interviews. Luckily for me, I am good at interviews. Or maybe I'm not, but I'm just better than most of the computer science world. You remember those kids in high school who never quite grasped being normal in public? A lot of those people are my competition. And that's very, very good for me.

But very, very bad for those other people. I look at some of my coworkers, and I wonder how they will ever get another job. These are incredibly smart people, great programmers, fantastic employees and coworkers, but I don't know how they ever convinced anyone to hire them. They get nervous talking to me, and I don't want to imagine how they'd be in front of a panel of judging strangers. I honestly don't even think that I'm all that great at interviews, but maybe the standards are just low in this field. I show up, do not wet my pants, manage to eek out a few complete sentences without hyperventilating, and I have a job! Staying calm really seems to be the only thing that I do differently, and it apparently makes a big difference. The answers to the questions don't even seem to matter. Of course, the percentage of right (or at least reasonably correct) answers to incorrect answers probably has a lot to do with the stress levels of the interviewee.

I've done a lot of interviews. This go around, I did two in-persons and countless phone screenings. A couple years ago, it was about the same. I got my start in high school, though, back when I was trying to convince scholarship committees that they wanted to pay for my college education. My first interview was for the Morehead Scholarship, UNC's free ride. I didn't want to go to UNC, but no one in my school had ever won the Morehead, so I applied. The interview was a fiasco. I did not have butterflies in my stomach, I had ferrets or something. My hands and voice were shaky and I sat with those judges, everyone in the room knowing with complete understanding that I was not going to get this scholarship. And after that, I was fine. Sure I'll get a little nervous, but my stomach never hurts. I don't shake. I manage to come up with good, yet unique answers. Maybe I just know that nothing could ever go as badly as that Morehead interview, and since I've already survived the worst, I might as well chill out.

I remember another scholarship interview, an all-day affair where fifteen candidates met with three judges separately. This was a big scholarship, and the downtime hanging out in the hall in between meetings was tense. One of these judges was your typical genius college professor; he was eccentric, had crazy Einstein hair, and asked really hard, thoughtful questions. At the end of my session with him, he shook my hand and said that I could relax because it was over. I shrugged and smiled at him and replied, "I'm alright." He cocked his head to the side and looked at me before saying, "I believe you are." I really don't know why I do so well at interviews. I'm just really glad that I do.