#69. Offers (Tuesday, February 4, 2014)
What was your best day…of having that critical job/school application come through?
Based on what I knew as of the morning of February 4, 2014, there was a fair concern that my life may have been about to go seriously off the rails.
The situation was this. As of a month ago, I had just completed the MA Economics program at Duke University (#72). However, everything beyond that was up in the air. I had intended to go into a PhD program immediately following, and had done about fifteen applications that all wrapped up in early January; but my grades in the Fall term had been quite below my expectations, so I had already conceded that I might have to shift my focus to finding a job instead.
Problem was: I wasn’t really doing that either. The only one I had seriously applied for was an economist position at an institution back in Canada; on the insistence of my parents. I had done my second-round interview two weeks before and returned to North Carolina right after, under the expectation that I would keep trying to find something in the U.S. in the few months before my VISA period was up. But again, my typical issue – the inability to put that extra effort in to look for a job, especially after my Wall Street efforts had fallen through (#75) – had taken over again. Since I got back, I hadn’t really made much progress on anything.
Having been conditioned to pessimism, in my mind there was a chance none of these pending applications were going to come through; at which point, I hesitate to think of what might have happened after.
But that morning, I get an e-mail from University of Southern California Marshall (the business school) Admissions. I’m on their short-list of candidates for their Finance PhD program and they want to fly me out to Los Angeles for a visit day next month. Incredible. I did not think I had shot, but there it is. Some hope after all…
Not twenty minutes later, I get a call. It’s from an HR rep at the institution back home, and she’s called me to congratulate me on the offer…
It came through. It actually came through. It actually came through. My first real job.
Of course, you all know what I ended up doing, but just to complete the story: I got another call from someone from University of California Irvine (UCI) asking me about my research interests, etc.1, and I gave my fairly good (and confident, for obvious reasons) response. Later that night, an offer comes in for the UCI Finance PhD program.
I also got a call that afternoon from the director of the debt policy team (#114) I’d be joining. He explained the function and my role, that they were excited to have me, and that my desk and everything was ready and I could start any time. He struck me as a really, really cool guy (he was even joking about Duke basketball), and from that I got an extremely positive impression.
And thus ended the first day of my adult life.
NB: A life-defining decision point does come up a few months later when USC (better than UCI) offers me a spot – without even a flyout – after I’ve already started working. I do consider it, before ultimately declining and staying at my institution (for ten years and counting). It’s impossible to say whether I made the right decision: we’ve got over forty post-2014 entries on both this list and the other (unpublished) list making good arguments on both sides…