Graduate students must be the nicest people in the world. It takes dedication and self-restraint to be consistently nice to peers and colleagues, but to be so selflessly caring and so committed to the best interests of Google LLC, Rutgers University or Nvidia Corporation, one truly has to be the nicest person in existence.
Therefore, as I watch one after another graduate student in my practice fret over whether they really are the best candidates for a job or internship they really want, I have no choice but to conclude that graduate students must be a unique breed of selfless people. That is the charitable interpretation, anyway. The less charitable interpretation, of course, is that many grad students have not read the memo about looking out for their own best interests, so please—treat this blog as just such a memo.
The idea here is very simple: Industry employers and universities are very good at looking out for themselves, and they require no help from you. Therefore, if a job is posted that you think would be good for you, your task is to take reasonable steps (“reasonable” being a key word) to create a good application and then to send the application to the employer. That is all. Here are things that are not your job:
- Figuring out whether you are worthy of the job
- Figuring out whether other people you know would be better for the job
- Figuring out whether you meet every last requirement in the job posting
- Figuring out whether, if they hire you, they will later come to regret it
Simply put, do not pre-interview yourself! It is the employer’s job to read applications and conduct interviews, and you best believe that they can handle that task just fine. Let them decide whether you meet their requirements. Let them decide whether you have enough industry experience. Let them decide whether your publications are strong enough. If you let them do the interviewing, you may indeed find out that the answer to these questions is “no,” but it could be “yes,” whereas if you pre-interview yourself and take yourself out of the running, well then—”no” it is.
I can already hear some of the objections to this message:
“What do you mean, we shouldn’t worry too much about the job requirements? That’s ludicrous! If you apply for a job for which you clearly do not qualify, you will just annoy people and give yourself a bad name!”
That would be true if, say, you were trained as a physicist but decided to apply for a job in international health policy. But that is not what commonly happens. What commonly occurs (and women seem to be more prone to this than men, unfortunately) is that someone meets most requirements and contemplates whether they should even bother applying because the job description says they need to graduate by May, but they will only graduate in July. To this I say—apply, apply, apply! No one will think less of you for applying under these circumstances, and you never know—they may like you enough to overlook the dates.
Another potential objection is that applying is not free—it takes a lot of effort and steals time away from other important tasks. And then there is the cost of rejection. Applying for very aspirational jobs can result in more unsuccessful applications or failed interviews, and this can be really hard on the ego. This objection is more complicated and a blog about handling rejection is coming up.
What I will say here is that relying on your own assessment of your chances of being a successful candidate only works if you are capable of a fairly accurate assessment. That would require, among other things, that you are not overly self-critical, that you are possessed of a reasonable amount of optimism, that you accurately understand how you rank compared to others who may be applying, that you accurately understand what qualities employers are really looking for, and the list goes on.
And then there is the unfortunate truth that many of you are competing in such oversaturated fields that you will face a lot of rejection, no matter what you do or how good you are.
Juxtaposing these two facts, that you may not be the best self-interviewer anyway, and that you may not be able to escape rejection no matter what you do, wouldn’t you say that it is better to apply for a job you might really enjoy and let the employer do the interviewing after all?
