Exactly a week ago [at the time of writing this blog], I was soundly asleep after dancing in THON. 48 hours ago, I was soundly asleep after spending 12 hours interviewing to be a PhD student. In 48 hours, I will be interviewing candidates for a position that I currently hold.

As I was at this interview over the weekend, making friends with other applicants (who will someday be my academic peers) as we tried not to think about how stressed we were, we commented on how weird it feels to be in the middle of two worlds. On one hand, about half of us interviewing are current undergraduates. In our daily lives, we are treated like undergrads at our respective universities and in our respective labs. But for that weekend, we were not treated like undergraduates—they offered us beer and wine two nights in a row, took us out for meals, financed hotel rooms and flights from all corners of the country, and asked us seriously about our research interests.

It feels a bit like I am living in two worlds, as I go through this interviewing and decision making process. I am quite literally spending the next few weeks flying between being the interviewer in State College and being the interviewee at universities around the country. My position as an interviewer is quintessentially “senior-in-undergrad”—it is a position of me figuring out the best way to pass on an organization that I love and prepare it to live on without my presence. My position as an interviewee is a position of me getting ready to be a professional student and to actually have a future in academia, something I’ve been dreaming about for years. But for the next few weeks I am stuck in the middle, switching hats in the good old State College airport on my Thursday 6am flights.

I would love to have more time to go through all of this. More time to take it all in and enjoy every moment, more time to prepare myself, more time to contemplate my decisions, more time to just be. But I really don’t have any more time, so I am trying to make do with what I have. And in order to do so, I’m setting myself a list of priorities as I approach and move through each of these milestones:

• Enjoy my time. I don’t want to look back on my last few weeks at Penn State and just think about being busy and stressed the whole time. I only get to go on these grad school visits or to select the new board once, and I want to take in the opportunity and enjoy it while it lasts.
• Listen to my gut. I love having the time to thoroughly think through my decisions so that I know I’m making the right call. The thing is, I don’t have that luxury right now so I am truly using this time to start trusting my initial reactions. One thing I’ve learned over the past year is that hindsight truly is 20/20. In some ways that scares me because I don’t want to make a decision that I will regret later, but in other ways it almost comforts me because I know that if the decision is hard it is because it could go either way, and that means that no one decision is automatically the wrong one. If I spend less time getting caught up in a decision and overthinking it, maybe I will also spend less time going back to it in the months to come and second-guessing myself.
• Focus on the future. While I have loved my time at Penn State, I do need to accept that it is very quickly coming to the end. I need to think about what is best for my organization moving forward, and what is best for my future. Where do I want to be in five, ten years, and how can I best get there? What does my organization need now, and who can best provide that? This is not the time to go back and wish I could do things differently, this is the time to focus on doing better with what is to come.