What's on your "to-do" list for tomorrow?

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

This thread seems like a good excuse to have a bit of a vent.

This Thursday I have an interview for the job I have spent my whole adult life dreaming of. It's for a tenure track job as a professor of Irish literature in a US university. A job like this comes up, on average, once every five years or so, and has about 200 or so applicants. Every single applicant would be a PhD with a good track record of publications and teaching. I had an initial interview at the start of the month (maybe 10 people get this) and, against the odds, I've been asked to make a visit to the campus (maybe 3 people get this). An opportunity like this, in other words, comes up once in a lifetime, if you are lucky. The interview is Thursday.

So I've spent the last three days preparing material for a teaching demonstration and for a talk to the department about my scholarship and what makes it significant to the field. Tomorrow (and this is where I'm on topic) though, I have to teach five hours of classes in composition in my current job, and prepare lesson plans for the following day for literature classes. But I also need to cut about another 2000 words from my talk, and prepare answers for every conceivable question I could be asked by a platoon of college deans, professors, lecturers, and graduate students.

And every time I feel tired, I have to remind myself that this may be my last chance to get the job of my dreams, that if I don't grasp this chance, everything that follows for the rest of my days will be tinged with the regret that I left this opportunity behind.

I'll practice delivering the talk and the teaching demonstration about ten or fifteen times each, if I get a chance to do so. And when I go to bed, exhausted, there's a good chance I'll wake up every half hour or so with a million thoughts in my head about what I should change in the talk, what questions might come up in the interviews (they will last from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening, with the talk and teaching squeezed in in between), how I might best approach the class, and how hard it will be to pick myself up off the floor if it goes wrong and I don't get the job.

I may also have a **** at some stage. You have to treat yourself.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

Thanks! Today's not been too bad, got some reassuring feedback from someone I trust about the talk I'll be giving, and my own teaching is out of the way now so I can focus entirely on what needs to be done.

On topic: to-do list tomorrow -
Make sure my suit is in proper order
Get to the plane on time
Pray they don't have any plan to bring me out for dinner or anything and will leave me alone to prepare
Prepare answers to about fifty potential questions
Boil them down to a few basic bullets I can actually remember
Worry and fret
Get to my hotel, practice my talk
Practice lesson plan
Practice talk
Practice lesson plan
Practice talk (repeat ad nauseam)
Massive **** (for nerves and because I'm staying alone in a hotel, I'm pretty sure it's the law)
Sleep