If You Don't Have Interviews, Don't Go

I strongly agree with the advice of anon 9:19, here:

If you have no interviews and are on the market, I _highly_ advise you to avoid the Smoker and the APA. If you've already bought tickets, just let the money go. There is no pain like being interviewless at the APA (if you're on the market).

I may have written about this before, but I went to the E-APA with no interviews my first year out. It was aggressively terrible. I was surrounded by friends who had interviews, who were acutely and intensely stressed out about doing well in their interviews. I, on the other hand, was experiencing a much deeper, existential anxiety. I felt like a ghost. Everything was going on around me, but I couldn't touch it. My friends could at least go some distance toward managing their stress by preparing for their interviews; I had nothing.

Sometimes people say that you should go once just to get a taste of the meat-market atmosphere without the pressure of being involved. That's possible. But I don't think it's worth it, and if you're going to do it, you should do it before you're on the market at all. By the time you're on the market, it's definitely not worth it.

--Mr. Zero