It was the end of the workday at my institute and we had gone out to say farewell to a co-worker from our IT department that was leaving to Copenhagen. We were having some drinks and nice chats outside when this girl approached me, introduced herself and mentioned that she is part of a ambitious international training network.

My mind wandered off to a topic I have had in my mind for some time. She was carefully selected for this fellowship among probably hundreds of other applicants that did not make the cut. Each of them very capable I’m sure, but the person in front of me was chosen as the best.

Suddenly, I visualized to the right of the girl a random person representing the 2nd best candidate, and to the left the third best. One by one, I mentally filled the place in front of me with a crowd of apparitions of all the potential fellowship holders.

They were overlapping partially with each other, creating rather corporal aberrations, and displaying shifting degrees of transparency, as If someone was playing around with the alpha parameter of a graphical plot. I had a swarm of faces in front of me, a cluster of people, representing holistically the job position itself. The job position was talking to me.

Ideally, one would create a K-nearest neighbors graph to leverage the strengths and limitations of each applicant, forming a collective mind with the optimal pool of skills required for the task. But for now, only one unit of human body can occupy one unit of job position at a time.

I feel like these positions are static safe spots in an abstract space, and we applicants are buzzing around like working bees.

I came back down to earth and had a pleasant conversation.