Job talk prep... and valuable life lessons?

In late summer, I started thinking about what I would need to prepare to go on the job market this fall. With the dawn of the new academic year began the CV updating and tweaking of research statements and the gradual accumulation of a list of current job postings (I really do enjoy making lists). In late September, I started sending in my first batch of applications, which I've dealt with in waves around the 1st and 15th of each month ever since. I've spent countless hours researching departments and customizing cover letters, not to mention harassing my supervisor, with little success, to get his reference letters in by the deadlines. 

I was so focused on putting together a good application, however, that I neglected to spend any time thinking about what to do if any of these places actually wanted to interview me! So when I was phoned last week and asked for an interview I went into shock a bit and immediately thought to myself, "F--K! I have two weeks to prepare a job talk!" The next few hours involved a lot of panic and wandering around muttering profanity to myself. After overindulging on celebrating with Thai food and wine, the panic subsided a bit, at least enough for me to come up with a title for my talk and put together a pretty awesome title slide.

Anyway, the upside was that once I started thinking about how to convince an entire department why my research is important and they should pay me large sums of money to keep doing it, it was kind of reinvigorating. The day-to-day stresses of work had really been sucking all the enjoyment out of research for me lately. The endless meetings and revisions and lab drama (*cough* people not cleaning equipment properly *cough*) was really wearing me down. But by spending some time trying to sell my research to other people I kind of re-sold myself on it. I had started the day thinking, "how am I ever going to make this interesting to a diverse department that includes people who care nothing about cognitive neuroscience?" and ending the day thinking, "damn, this sh-t is cool! I would totally hire me"

So, the moral of this story is that sometimes you have to take a step back from the monotony and daily frustrations and remind yourself why you love your work so that you can continue to love it. And also, that you should probably start preparing your job talk a whole hell of a lot sooner than I did.