Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’ve been in the process of applying to graduate schools for nearly a year now. Between researching different programs, filling out the applications, taking the GRE, obtaining letters of recommendation, interviewing, and God knows what else, applying to graduate school can be an excruciating (and expensive) ordeal. This time of year is interview season for most programs. Here I present one possible way to approach your grad school interviews.

Interviewer: Hello, Jonathan. I’m glad to finally meet you.

Me: As you should be.

Interviewer: Yes, well. Tell me why you’re interested in our program.

Me: You strike me as both easily subjugated and yet worthy of my presence. Also, Professor X is doing some very interesting work.

Interviewer: He’s not taking any new students this year, you know.

Me: Of course I know, fool. I know all. I shall merely bide my time until the machinery of the universe churns toward my goals, of which you are but a cogwheel.

Interviewer: Okay. What, exactly, do you think you can bring to our program?

Me: Unyielding intelligence. Untamed power, like a wild stallion. Sex appeal. A gaze that pierces the impure hearts of the false. In short, all the things men fear. I am also very interested in teaching.

Interviewer: It says here on your CV that you’ve done some work at a rehabilitation hospital. In your personal statement you mention that as an undergraduate you felt torn between clinical work and research. Why is that?

Me: Would you fault a rainbow for having many colors, or the very birds in the heavens for their many songs? You need only know that from the vast, incomprehensible prism of my interests I have selected a single brilliant hue, and now wish to focus it to the intensity of a deadly laser. Blue.

Interviewer: Oh, good. Why don’t I tell you a little bit about the work I’m doing at the moment?

Me: Why don’t you fall into a well and die?

Interviewer: You’re funny. I like that. I like you, in fact. Tell me, do you feel that there any weaknesses in your background of which we should be aware?

Me: Mortality. The knowledge of which hangs on me, as it does us all, like a great chain. We exist but for a flickering moment, unaware of the long eons that came before us and doomed to be excluded from future worlds we may never know.

Interviewer: Well…we’re almost out of time, and I must say I’m impressed. I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but if we were to extend you an offer, what do you think your response would be?

I take a long drag on my cigarette, exhaling it, slowly, into the Interviewer’s face. There is silence, broken only by the Interviewer’s ugly, choking coughs.

Interviewer: Well, it was a real pleasure meeting you. Thank you for coming in.

Me: Yes.