Captain's Web Log(1) - 4 Nov 2015 - The Psych Eval

It's the day after the psych eval, and I'm waiting to hear back. Overall, it was a pretty uneventful process. The psychologist firm that contracts with Lockheed to do the evaluations is located in Denver, so I had to fly to Denver on Monday afternoon in order to be in town for the test which was on Tuesday at 9am. So I arrived in Denver on Monday around 6, met up with a friend in Boulder for dinner, and then drove down to south west Denver to my hotel for the night. I was a little bummed it was already dark when I arrived; I've never been to Boulder/Denver before (except airport layovers), so I was sad to miss the scenery.



Anyway, on to the actual test:

I showed up at the psychologist's office, across the street from the hotel, a few minutes before my 9 am appointment. An office assistant greeted me and handed me some paperwork to start on. She directed me to a room where two others were already sitting working on their paperwork. One was one of my fellow SPT candidates, and one was not an Antarctica candidate at all (the firm apparently also does a lot of psych testing for police and other similar jobs). Two others joined us over the next few minutes (one more SPT candidate and one more non-Antarctic candidate), and at 9 am the office assistant reappeared to give us our testing packets and instructions. The south pole candidates take the MMPI-2 and the 16PF, which are standard personality evaluations (you can look them up on Wikipedia if you're curious). Both are multiple choice scantron tests with all sorts of questions, from the mundane (true or false: "I like mechanics magazines" or "I would certainly like to be a florist") to the rather bizarre (true or false: "Evil spirits possess me at times"). While everyone is working on their tests, we were one by one called in to talk to the psychologist. I had heard that sometimes they ask you jarring or shocking questions in the interview, but mine was pretty basic. Where am I from? What do my parents do? Why do I want to go to the south pole? What are my personal and professional goals? What are my strengths and flaws? Nothing particularly surprising or weird. I didn't look at the clock, but I'm guessing the interview was maybe ten minutes or so. Then I was sent back to finish up the written tests.

After a grand total of a little over 2 hours, I filled in the last scantron bubble, turned in my forms, and left. I'm worried I came off as an unrepentant rule-breaker on the test. It seemed like there were a lot of questions about when it's ok to break or bend rules, and I answered "yes" to a lot of them (there are always edge cases, right?!?). So I'm sort of worried I failed on that account, but who knows. I told the psychologist that being a worry-wart was one of my flaws, so I guess I'm living up to that. She said we'd get the results Tuesday or Wednesday, but it's Wednesday afternoon and I still haven't heard anything either way.



After the test, the three of us who are South Pole candidates went for sushi together. My flight wasn't until late, so after lunch I drove up to Boulder to do some exploring (Mountains everywhere! So pretty!). I may have spent an unreasonable amount of time in Montbell drooling over climbing toys (I admit nothing). Grabbed dinner with a friend from NIST, and then off to the airport and back to Madison.

So now it's just a waiting game, YIKES!