An Interview for an Entry-Level Data Analyst Position

The woman leading him into his interview had a smile like a picket fence in a nice

suburb. Clark smiled back at her, conscious of his own coffee-stained teeth. He knew exactly

what his smile looked like because he’d been practicing it in the mirror that morning while

retying his tie for the fifth time. When he had asked Allison how he looked, she said, “Fine,” not

seeming to understand how high the stakes were. This was the first interview he had gotten after

more than fifty applications. He wanted this job. He needed this job.

“Please, just have a seat right here,” his interviewer said, gesturing at a wooden chair on

one side of a table. Clark paused before sitting down as he noticed the plastic gallon of milk on

the table.

“Oh, is that—” He gestured at it, not knowing what he was going to ask. Maybe a

previous interviewee had left it?

She said, “Don’t worry, my colleague is getting cups,” and sat down across the table from

him, next to a third chair.

Clark’s lip curled at the thought of drinking the milk, and he pulled it back down. The

smell of hot milk made him nauseous, and all milk smelled cloying to him after years as a

barista. He set his messenger bag down and ran his fingers along the strap, looking between the

door and the woman across from him. She kept smiling at him while tapping her pen against the

table. Eventually, the door opened and a man entered, white, middle-aged, bald with a graying

beard, and promised cups in hand.

The woman perked up, pushing her hair behind her ears and smiling. “Robert! What took

you so long?”

“Oh, sorry, I just had to fight past the ravenous tigers in the hallways.” He bared his teeth

and bit the air, clawing a hand in what Clark supposed was his tiger impression. Clark rolled his

eyes, then hoped his interviewers hadn’t seen that.

The woman threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, you’re too funny. Take your seat!”

With Robert seated, the woman finally made the introductions. She was Deandra, the

head of marketing, and Robert was DeepA Therapeutics’ HR representative. Neither had a last

name, apparently.

“So, Clark,” Robert said, pulling his chair closer. “Tell us about yourself.”

He pulled apart the stack of three plastic cups and set them in a row. Without breaking

eye contact with Clark, he filled a cup with milk.

“I'm Clark Vega,” he said, for either the second or third time so far, “and I graduated this

spring, so I'm hoping to find a job.”

Idiot. Of course he was looking for a job, that's why he was here. He knew should have

practiced more. Maybe he should have taken his girlfriend up on her offer of standing in as a

mock interviewer. He had said no because Allison didn't know anything more about how actual

corporate jobs worked than he did, not that he told her so, of course.

He almost wondered if she had offered because it wouldn't prepare him, so he'd flunk the

interview and have to stick around on campus and get another minimum wage job just like her. It

said something twisted about him that whenever Allison said, “I’ll miss you if you leave,” his

mind added, “So you’d better stay.”

“Right,” Deandra said, tapping her pen again. She hadn’t yet written anything down. “But

what inspired you to apply here? You have a bachelor’s in physics. Why are you interested in

marketing data analysis?”

“Excellent question, Dee,” Robert said and pushed the jug of milk toward her.

Deandra simpered. “Oh, thank you.” She poured herself a full cup of milk, smiling at

Robert.

Clark raised a hand to draw their attention back to him. “I have a computer science

minor,” he pointed out, “so it was always on my radar as a possibility. And I did research with a

professor, Dr. Piñeda, dealing with, like, star catalogs.”

He paused, noticing Deandra was filling the third cup with milk.

Robert’s brow furrowed. “Can you explain further? Sorry to say, we're not

astrophysicists.” He smiled over at Deandra, but she was still focused on pouring the milk.

Robert cleared his throat and turned back to Clark. “So what did you do?”

Clark took a deep breath, glad to be on steadier ground. “I wrote a Python script to pull

information from any star in a catalog, or from every star in a catalog, so then you could, say,

take the temperatures of all the stars and plot them against their luminosities for an H-R

diagram.”

Deandra pushed the cup of milk toward him. Was she expecting him to drink it? The

fluorescent lights reflected in the milk made it look yellowish and sour. He grabbed the cup,

grateful the milk was still cool. At least holding the cup gave him something to do with his

hands.

He continued, “I was working with observations taken by students at the campus

observatory, and of course not every star had all the same parameters calculated for it, so I had to

figure out how I wanted that information to display when you were trying to, say, plot that H-R

diagram.”

His mouth was dry and he was lifting the cup to his mouth before he was even aware of

what he was doing. He cringed as he swallowed not-water, then he took a second sip to pretend

he had intended to drink the milk on purpose. What kind of weird-ass company offered milk at

an interview anyway?

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” he asked, noticing Robert's mouth moving under his milk-

flecked mustache. Deandra looked over at Robert and rolled her eyes. The corner of Robert’s

mouth twitched.

“So that’s why you’re interested in data analysis?” he asked.

“I was getting there.” That came out peevish. He took another sip of milk that coated his

tongue, then tried again. “Yes! Exactly! I loved working with the data and I knew I wanted to

continue doing that.” He lied, “I applied to work at DeepA because I find your mission

inspiring.” There was little about working in marketing for a pharma start-up that he found

inspiring, but he would rather be employed than inspired. And he also wanted to make ninety-

thousand a year instead of the maybe forty-thousand he'd get from a grad school stipend, but he

also wasn't supposed to say that. Interviews would be so much easier if he could just answer the

questions honestly.

Deandra beamed at him. “I was just going to ask you what attracted you to us in

particular. Why exactly do you find it inspiring?”

Clark could answer without thinking, because he had already spelled that out in the cover

letter he'd had the sense to review in the car during the drive over. Allison had driven because he

had been shaking with nerves and caffeine all morning. The over-caffeination had been her fault

since she’d shown up on his doorstep with a twenty-ounce travel mug of black coffee.

Robert’s head bobbed while Deandra scribbled something down. She reached out with

her pencil to tap Robert’s forearm and he glanced over at what she wrote and chuckled.

Clark craned his neck, trying to see the page, but his vision blurred as he tried to focus on

the papers across the table. He blinked the fog away.

He eyed his cup of milk and then looked over at his interviewers' cups. They both looked

full. Robert had only taken one sip. Was it poisoned? No, that was ridiculous. It was just old and

a little off, if anything. He sniffed at the milk. It smelled bad, but all milk smelled bad to him.

“Clark?” Robert waved a hand. “Could you describe a time you've run into a problem and

had to solve it? This could be in your personal life or in previous employment.”

“But please don't feel the need to air out anyone else's dirty laundry,” Deandra added

with a titter. Robert snickered with her.

Clark eyed them as their laughter died off. “Right, well, when I was a barista, I had a shift

where everyone else had called off and I was the only one working because our shift manager

completely misread the schedule. To solve it... I was honest with customers and told them I was

the only one there so they'd have to bear with me. I served all the teas and drip coffees first. And

then when my shift was over, I shut myself in the bathroom and cried.”

Wait, no, he didn't mean to say that. He took a sip of the milk to shut himself up, then

remembered he didn't trust the milk and pushed it away from himself again.

He found himself asking, “Hey, is there anything weird with the milk?"”

Deandra's brow furrowed. “It's two-percent. Maybe you're used to whole milk?”

Clark narrowed his eyes. Her eyes had darted to the left, which Allison told him was a

sign of lying. Which meant there was something weird about the milk.

Deandra cleared her throat and asked, “Is there a step you took to make sure the same

thing wouldn't happen again in the long-term?”

“I quit.” Clark slapped a hand over his mouth, then tried to turn it into a thoughtful chin-

stroke. He took a sip of his milk to keep himself from saying anything more.

His interviewers laughed and his shoulders relaxed. That was not how Allison reacted

when he told her he had quit. She had frowned at him and asked what he was going to do if he

wasn’t going to stay at the café.

“I'll be honest, I shouldn’t have told that story knowing how it ended,” Clark admitted.

He scraped his tongue against his teeth to get rid of some of the milk-feel, then offered, “I can

tell you about a different problem?”

“How about we move on to a different question? Would that work for you?”

“Yes, please.”

“Tell us about your greatest weakness.”

Clark groaned, then could smell his own milky breath. This was the epitome of a useless

interview question. It was supposedly about self-reflection but was really about testing how good

he was at saying what the company wanted to hear. He knew he could talk about his single-

mindedness and turn it into a kind of strength, but that wasn't his greatest weakness, as far as he

was concerned. Right now, his greatest weakness was being foolish enough to drink the milk.

So he said, “My greatest weakness is that I thought it would be a good idea to drink the

milk.”

The interviewers laughed again, laughed so hard they were leaning back in their chairs,

heads bobbing. Their laughs faded out as he stared at the cup and the pieces started clicking

together.

Pharmaceutical company? Click.

Strange biological response? Click.

“Did you put something in the milk?”

That set the pair of interviewers off again, chortling and hardy-har-har-ing. Clark stared

at his cup. There was some gritty remnant left at the bottom. He angled the cup, trying to

ascertain if it had a colored glint.

Clark looked past the cup at the two interviewers sitting across from him. Laughing. They

were always laughing, like they didn’t even care about this interview, not even sobering up when

the interview started going downhill. No, the more he blurted, the more hilarious they found it.

And he had started blurting out the truth after drinking the milk.

Deandra sat forward, brow furrowed. “Clark, are you okay?”

“No.” He slammed the cup down. “No, I’m not. You gave me a truth serum. Why? I

guess you want honest answers from your applicants. Is that it?”

Deandra stood up and Robert followed suit. She reached her red-tipped fingers out to

Clark.

“Do you want to go get a drink of water? Take a walk, maybe? Are you lactose-

intolerant?”

“No, no, no.” Clark shook his head, pushing back the chair. “Something’s off.”

Deandra kept that hand reaching for him and he stepped back, stumbling past his chair.

“If there's not a truth serum, why the milk? Why would you offer me milk?”

“In case you wanted something to drink.” Deandra tilted her head at Robert, who slipped

out the door.

“In case I wanted something to drink?” Clark laughed. “Who wants to drink milk?”

It made no sense. Maybe the serum was opaque and couldn't be disguised in water.

Maybe the cows had been treated for the truth serum. Maybe it wasn't milk and it was all serum.

Robert returned with a security guard who stared at Clark, hands at his belt.

“Clark, our time is up, I'm afraid,” Deandra said.

Robert reached out to pull Deandra back toward him and the guard, like he was scared of

Clark. Clark laughed. Like he was the one who invited them here! He was just being truthful. An

open book! Wasn't that what they wanted?

This whole interview had been strange. First the milk, and then his interviewers had

seemed more interested in each other than in him. Maybe there had never been an open position

at all.

Allison was never going to believe this when he told her. No one would believe him.

Clark lunged forward and grabbed the jug of milk.

“I'm taking this,” he said.

Deandra stared at him. "Please, Clark, Patrick is here to escort you out.”

The security guard jerked his chin at the door. “It’s time to get going, buddy.”

“I’m not your buddy.” He jabbed the milk jug toward Robert and Deandra. “Just you wait

until I have proof! I’ll- I’ll—” He didn’t know what he’d do,

The security guard escorted him back through the building and Clark kept a tight hold on

the milk. Patrick held the door open for him and stared.

Clark turned the milk he had cradled against his chest away from Patrick.

“You're not going to try to take it?"

"What?” Patrick’s brow furrowed. “No, man."

Clark bounced on the balls of his feet, waiting to see if Patrick would break and try to

grab the milk. Finally, he bolted through the door and across the parking lot to his girlfriend's

Subaru. He yanked at the handle.

Allison jerked her head up from her book, eyes narrowed, then broke into a smile when

she saw him. She unlocked the door and he scrambled in, dropping the jug in the console and

locking the door after himself.

“So...how'd it go?" Allison asked, turning the key in the ignition. “Not well, I’m

guessing?”

Clark shook his head. His pits were uncomfortably damp. “No, not well. It went horribly.

Disastrously.” He kept jerking his head to the side, looking back toward the office. “Would you

start driving already?”

Allison put the car into gear, and he watched the building recede into the background.

Then Allison pulled the car off the side of the road. No, no no. He felt sweat drip down his back.

Why was she stopping?

“Why are you stopping?”

She frowned at him. “I’m worried about you.”

“What?” Clark pressed his back against the car seat, leaning away from Allison and all

the concern in her eyes.

“You’re sweaty and quiet and it’s weird.” A smile flashed across her lips. “So the

interview was disastrous? Maybe you need to talk about it.”

“You won’t believe what happened—”

He cut himself off. She wouldn’t believe what happened. It sounded crazy. It was crazy.

If he hadn’t lived it, he never would have believed it. For all of Allison’s many, many warnings

of how badly an interview could go, none of them compared. It looked like he’d be sticking

around campus for at least another year. Allison would be happy, at least.

His vision zeroed-in on her mouth, the smile looping in his mind over and over again.

She did seem happy, didn’t she? Happier than she should be.

“Clark?”

He asked, “Did you want it to go badly?”

“What are you talking about?” Clark flinched as she slapped the back of her hand onto

his forehead and asked, “Are you sick?”

He didn’t trust her. Before, he would have been happy to push these doubts to the side,

but look at how that had turned out for him today. He had thought the milk was off from the

start, hadn’t he? And he didn’t say a thing, he even drank it, and it made a fool of him as he was

compelled to tell the truth.

He stared at the milk sitting between them.

“Okay, babe,” he said, easing forward and looking Allison in the eye. She looked

guileless, but she always looked guileless. It was impossible to tell.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asked, tilting his head.

“Of course.”

“Will you take a sip of that milk?”

Allison’s brows furrowed but she reached for the jug and unscrewed the cap. She looked

at him out of the corner of her eye and took a sip. Clark watched her throat flex as she

swallowed.

“Okay. I’ll ask again,” he said. “Do you hope I get rejected everywhere? So I have to

stay?”

Allison slammed the milk jug back into the console, then stared at him, lips parted. “Do

you really think that?” She reached over the console to touch his knee. “Why would you—”

Clark covered her hand with his own. “Hey, babe? Answer the question, please.”

“No! Of course not! Why would you ask that?”

Clark squeezed her hand as muscles he hadn’t realized were tense relaxed. She was

telling the truth. He looked at the milk, wondering if he could even blame DeepA for using it

when it could cut through so much bullshit. Well, yes. Yes, he could.

“It’s fine,” he said, forcing a smile. “You know what, I wouldn’t want to work there,

anyway.”

His girlfriend smiled back at him. “I’m happy to hear that.”

by Mathilda Nilsson