Tropophilia

Welcome to a series of posts that I’m going to name after my old personal blog: Journeys with Jrod.  My goal here is to chronicle my thoughts and actions as I pack up my life in one city and move it to another.  Who knows what will happen, but I’m hoping that it will serve as a sort of personal frame tale within the larger study of change that is Tropophilia.  On a slightly more selfish note, it will also give me a way to work out my own thoughts and feelings about leaving my friends and familiar surroundings for a new, unfamiliar setting. I look forward to reading your feedback and advice in the comments.

How It Happened

It began with nothing.

Doing nothing, that is.  Due to circumstances beyond my and, to a slightly lesser degree, beyond my employer’s control, I had no work to do.  A good third, at the least, of my time was being “billed to the firm”, as we say — in other words, being wasted.  Of course, I’m no enemy of free time.  The first few days of idleness were devoted to writing long-overdue responses to e-mails I had received, catching up on blog and news items, and spending some fun hours on YouTube and MiniClip.

Yet, as this blog’s existence proves, I’m not very good with extended periods of unproductivity.  Taylor and I created Tropophilia to fend off the atrophy of our creative and other mental powers that were trained and honed at Davidson.  I felt the same pangs sometimes during my year in France.  The feeling of being really challenged just wasn’t there.  And so it was that I began thinking about trying to find a new job.

I had applied to Google last year before graduation, for a position as a Trademark Assistant I believe.  I’d been a fan of Google for years as my interests in technology had developed, and knew that I wanted to head to law school down the road, so this seemed like it would be the perfect marriage of those interests.  They didn’t have a space for me, though, so my sights refocused on moving to Washington, D.C. and seeking paralegal positions from the abundance of firms headquartered there.

Now it was a different story, though.  I had a year of paralegal experience under my belt.  I had informed myself on legal issues in the technology industry through lots of reading and, a little later, writing.  And, unlike in those months preceding graduation when I was well in the grips of academic intellectual stimulation, I now had something that lacked in my first application: a very real, very intense hunger to have a job that would make a difference, that would teach me new and interesting things, that would challenge me.

In an hour or two I banged out a cover letter, modified and cleaned up my CV, and sent in my application for a Legal Assistant position with Google at their Mountain View, CA headquarters.  I kept an open mind and began looking at a few other jobs in the D.C. metro area.  Google receives over 1,000 applications a day for the various positions listed on their website, and I was expecting and bracing myself for the same computer-generated “thanks for your application, but…” email.

But this time, it never came.  Instead, one day I was a second too late in getting to my ringing cell phone, and the call went to voicemail.  The area code was unfamiliar, so I searched online.  San Francisco peninsula.  Holy…  My heart, already in overdrive, almost stopped when my phone buzzed with a new voicemail.  Recruiter from Google.  Got my application.  Wants to talk.  My email dinged at the same time with a similar message from the recruiter.

Decisions

And so it was that I began the interviewing process.  At the same time, I began a drawn-out decision making process.  There was a lot to think about as, each day, it seemed more and more likely that I would be offered a job.

The position is unbelievable.  I won’t go into details, but it is a very independent role serving numerous attorneys who deal with the entire collection of Google products and services.  There are no cons to the job, only pros.  The burden of proof lay not with the reasons for going, but with the reasons for staying.

I kept everything secret from everyone but my family and roommate at first, not wanting to count my chickens (or have anyone else count them for me) before they had hatched.  After each successive step in the process, however, as it seemed I was inching closer and closer to having an offer, I let more people know.  This part was almost as nerve racking as the interviews.  For the past year, I’ve been lucky — spoiled, really — to have a great community of friends around me.  We’ve lived and eaten together; shared endless jokes and links by e-mail; traveled to North Carolina, West Virginia and Michigan together; watched countless Davidson basketball games on T.V.; drunk countless margaritas and beers together; and more.  For Davidson, a college that graduates only several hundred young people each year, having this type of community right off the bat is rare.  During good times and bad, these guys had been my family.  That’s something I wouldn’t find in California.

So, leaving D.C. would be hard.  Heck, leaving the East coast would be hard!  Moving to California would mean being hundreds and thousands of miles away from everyone I knew and everything I was familiar with.  And I knew it would be tough for my friends, too.  In the end, though, I came to realize that the next year was going to be different no matter what time zone I was in.  Some other friends were moving away, others were moving elsewhere in D.C., and some had plans to move mid-year.  I couldn’t make the decision based on the past year, because it was exceptional.  2008-2009 would, one way or the other, not be the same as 2007-2008.  So I looked at it as if I was graduating from college again — an opportunity to do something extraordinary while I was young and without anything tying me down.

That was definitely the biggest hurdle to cross in making the decision.  There were certainly others.  Things were improving some at my current job, and leaving would mean renegeing on an informal two-year commitment I had made to them.  It would also potentially impact my timeline for law school; while the job with Google wouldn’t commit me beyond one year, I might like it so much that I would decide to delay going back to school one more year.  While I’m already hundreds of miles from most of my famiy, the increased distance from home would be tougher still.  And of course, there was the looming culture shock and loneliness  that I would likely encounter during my first months in California.

Worth it?

The end of the story, of course, is that I decided that the answer was “yes” and accepted the job the minute it was offered.  I had been weighing everything for over a month, talking to friends and family and trying to figure out if it was the right choice.  While even the logical balances tilted in favor of the job, it came down to listening to my heart.  And my heart said, “go.”

The tipping point came during my videoconference interview at Google’s D.C. headquarters.  There was a moment where one of my interviewers had to step out and see if there was anyone left to speak to me.  There were two giant projections on the wall of the room I was in — one showed the conference room in Mountain View from which the Googlers were transmitting, and the other showed the image of me that they were seeing.  I had been focusing on making “eye contact” with the interviewers by looking at the camera, and alternately looking at the image of them to make sure they were responding positively.

In the few minutes that she left the room, I took a look at myself on the second screen.  We had just spent two and a half hours talking about the job, my qualifications, and my interests — enough talking and listening time to either stress or tire me out.  But here I was, leaning forward, wanting to talk to them more.  I had pages of notes, not in case I was quizzed but because I was genuinely excited by and interested in everything we had discussed.  I looked comfortable.  I felt at ease.  And right before I heard the door open and my interviewer walked back in, I looked at my face and saw myself grinning from ear to ear.  I knew this is what I wanted, and I couldn’t have been happier than I was right there, sitting in a Google conference room, talking about technology.

California, here I come.

Images used under Creative Commons licenses courtesy of Flickr users Leo Reynolds and marttj.