This was a packed day.
And yet, I had trouble finding anything in the talks I wanted to hear.
i woke up, went down to the employment schedule, and fetched my
interview schedule. Then I went to Frank's pancake house and ate their
World Famous Apple Pancake. The thing was 20cm high, covered a full
plate and incredibly delicious. It also cost more than I expected to
spend on breakfasts, but splurging once is alright.
Then I walked around, doing nothing much, and checked out the
universities I was assigned to interview with on the web. Small.
Teaching oriented. And in small towns. Both of them.
First interview went well enough, though I doubt I'll want to go there
and I doubt they'll want me either. I'm not convinced that a university
whose main claim to desirability is their pre-veterinary and equestrian
programs will agree with my severe horse allergy.
The second went even better. They were seriously enthusiastic about me,
insisted I send in a real application (they don't accept email - they
require paper applications), and were hinting about wanting me to settle
down with a tenure track position. They also made a big deal about
handling mathematics-linguistics dual career couples well.
These interviews made me realize one thing I've done wrong. My cover
letters. I sent them out reading basically
Dear $COMMITTEE.
I would like to submit my application for $POSITION.
I believe I would be a good fit since my own research is tangential
to your departmental research, especially considering the areas
@AREA.
I have a 2-body problem, and you would be solving it.
I look forward to teaching.
with variations as appropriate.
What I should have written would be more along the lines of
Dear $COMMITTEE.
I would like to submit my application for $POSITION.
I believe I would be a good fit since my own research is tangential
to your departmental research, especially considering the areas
@AREA.
I have a 2-body problem, and you would be solving it.
I look forward to teaching.
Oh, and also, I have a kick-ass idea I've been working with for
several years, and that you should copy, with me at the helm. We
take a bunch of high schoolers, and we do undergraduate research
programs with them. Then, if we get insane amounts of NSF funding,
we'll send them off to the Junior Mathematical Congresses that the
Europeans keep on doing, or just organize one of those ourselves.
Furthermore, I believe it to be my sacred duty to spread my passion
about mathematics to the next generation.
Lunch was had with Rudbeckia
Hirta at a really neat mexican
restaurant. Lunch was good. Meeting Becky was kinda like a fanboi
interview session - she'd seen me in her comments section, but she
doesn't trawl the blogosphere like some of us do, and hadn't read
anything of mine. So many of my questions had natural answers along the
lines of "Well, you blogged this" and there was a clear imbalance in
familiarity between us.
My talk went OK. Afterwards, I chatted a bit with a couple of guys
loosely associated to the UPenn A-infinity workgroup, who know Ron Umble
well. Great fun.
Dinner was had with Mary Williams, a Phoenix based SF-fandom knitter
mathematician (why do those seem to reinforce each other?), who
convinced me to come along to the knitting circle, and whom I bestowed
waaaay to many good design ideas. Putting us together started some sort
of catalysis that probably wasn't healthy.
We watched a talk about using sonofication and music as a teaching tool.
And then went to the knitting circle.
I learned to knit again, and started on a small projectlet embedding the
Pascal Triangle Sierpinski model in knitting by just flipping the
stitches. I didn't have time to make it appear clearly, but it was fun.
I returned from the knitting circle completely exhausted at just before
midnight. Goodnight.