Academia

The weird thing about grad school is that everyone in it has always been good at things but now fears they might not be good at things. They've always made top grades and won lots of awards, but now competition for money and jobs is at the forefront of everyone's minds, and prospects are daunting. The University is in the process of hiring an unprecedentedly large number of people (making up for lost time and lost faculty during the recession/hiring freeze) and so I'm seeing a lot of job candidates circulate through the department. Some of them are really impressive and not very much older than me. The important thing to note is that there are a lot of them. They're interviewing about five people for every job they intend to give (which is vastly more than one can reasonably expect under normal circumstances), and have received literally hundreds of applications for each of those.

I have about five years to go from undergraduate to badass scientist, then convince someone (or two someones? a string of someones?) to hire me based on the promise that I will contribute to what humanity knows about things on a regular basis for the rest of my life. It's a tough sell, I guess. But if I pull it off, it'll be pretty amazing.