I’d like to tell you a story about my first real job interview after I graduated from college with a B.S. degree in Geology. As all students graduating from college know, getting that first job is a very difficult process. Personally, I approached the job field with some trepidation knowing that I was embarking on a difficult and arduous new journey of trying to find my first professional job and beginning to build my professional job career. And of course, before you can get that first job, you have to have that first job interview. Getting an interview is not as easy as it sounds, because in order to get an actual interview there has to be a job opening! Never an easy task during a tight job market, getting an interview is made especially hard when you have no job experience in the field of your chosen profession and you are just out of college. If you’re lucky your first interview goes well, and you walk away with a positive feeling recognizing that even if you don’t get that particular job, you’re headed in the right direction and your professional journey is about to begin. If you’re not lucky however your first job interview will go very badly and you’ll begin to question what the heck you were thinking when you decided on that college major– or even worse when you decided on going to college in the first place! And then if you are really not lucky at all, you will have a job interview like my first job interview – the job interview from hell!
If you think you have had some bad job interviews let me tell you about a really bad job interview. This was the job interview from hell! I mean, this job interview almost killed me -literally! I had graduated from college with a B.S. degree in geology and I thought, “I need a job so I can begin to recoup some of this money that I have spent on college”. I was looking everywhere for work. I tried looking in the petroleum industry; I went to Huston for a month and spent every day putting in job applications at the various petroleum companies located there. I look in Southern California and could not get work in the Engineering Geology industry. Finally I wound up in a plant in a small southern California town called Trona. And in that town they have a “mine” where they are pumping brine out of an old dry lake. It turns out there were a lot of old glacial lakes that formed one after the other in this area (they are referred to the as pluvial lakes), and as each lake formed and evaporated, the brine (dense salt water) that was left behind formed a last pond of water that was too salty to evaporate. A crusty top laden with sediment formed across the brine pond, and then a new lake would form during the next glacial event starting the whole process over again. These brine ponds formed and reformed until they were piled up on each other deep below the valley floor, and this mineral company in Trona (I won’t state their name) was pumping out the brine and processing it for rare earth minerals.
I thought I might be able go to Trona and get a job in this plant working as a geologist mapping the structure and extent of these subsurface brines. So I went there and tried to get a job interview, and of course they said they were not hiring which is what I expected. But to my surprise, they said, “we do have a mine that is looking for a geologist, and if you are interested we will set you up with an interview at this mine”.
Of course I was elated, and said, “Yes I would like an interview”. So they set me up with an interview in this uranium mine in New Mexico. Uranium is a secondary ore so it’s not deposited by an igneous plutonic molten rock like gold is for example. Rather, it is deposited as a secondary ore by water that percolates down through porous rocks and sediment dissolving the uranium and then depositing it lower in the sediment into concentrated ore bodies. This way Mother Nature does the concentrating work making it economically feasible to go after the ore. So this was a big uranium mine in soft, sedimentary rocks – rocks that allowed water to percolate through them. These rocks consisted of sandstone and siltstone rocks. So they set me up with this interview in Grant, New Mexico and I of course was very excited. This was my first significant interview. Little did I know that it was almost to become my last job Interview – ever!
Next week—segment No. 2 “My New Mexico Job Interview’’