Interviews

My search for post-college employment is progressing nicely. I have no offers yet but I should hopefully be hearing back from places soon regarding 2nd rounds. I don’t really want to comment on the firms with which I am interviewing, but I have a few observations about the general process I’d like to share.

1. Interviews are fun. People have said a good interview should be a conversation rather than an interrogation, and I’ve been striving to make that the case, and it makes it far more interesting at least from my perspective. I Think about it this way: I’m interviewing them to see if I want to work there just as much as they’re interviewing me to see if they want me to work there. Which brings me to my second point:

2. I’m not a fan of on campus interviews. Crazy, right? They are super convenient and on familiar territory. However, I much prefer getting to see the office of the company I am interviewing with. That allows me to get a feel for the atmosphere and in some cases meet potential coworkers. On a shallower note, it gives me a feel for the ambiance of the work space: I’d rather not working in a dark, cramped office if I can avoid it.

3. Career Services. Meh. Kudos to them for setting up on campus recruiting and some of the events they do, as well as the online job portal. Their advising is not so great though: I set up an appointment to lay out an approach for applications, and basically they told me I could wait until January to begin applying for jobs. False. In their defense, they did say to focus on the companies recruiting on campus this semester, although there are companies I want to work for that don’t recruit on campus who have early deadlines. They missed that one.

3a. There is a definite distinction among my peers of those who are applying for jobs now, and those who are heading career services’ advice. That said, the latter group may also be applying for jobs that don’t open until later. Still, it is very amusing to see the same faces over and over at all of the networking events.

4. Depending on how many offers I get, deciding will be tough. I’m only applying to places I would want to work. Some people I know are applying EVERYWHERE. Okay, not literally everywhere, but they certainly seem to have a lot of interviews. And maybe they do want to work at all of these companies. Compared to these people though, I have a fairly narrow scope for my job search.

At the risk of getting too wordy, I’ll leave it there for now.

Quick Thoughts on the Occupy Movement

Twice in the past week have run into the Occupy movement, once in Chicago and once in Boston. The fact that they have now become a visible movement means I actually have to start forming an opinion on them because everyone else is too. So here are my experiences and opinions:

– Both times I passed through groups of protestors, I was wearing a suit and tie; thus sort of representing the demographic they are protesting against. I was not accosted or even looked at funny: these are a very respectful group of protesters, and for that, they have won my respect.

– I don’t understand the people who tell them they need to get specific. There’s more than one thing wrong with this country; why can’t they protest all of the problems? Is our political system only able to focus on one thing at a time? Seems like it.

– I’m glad to see normal people exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, petition, and assembly. I’ve heard enough from the tea party. I’m not going to say that they are the opposite of the tea party though, because the occupy movement is unhappy with both political parties. While I’m not saying I support all of what they stand for, I support their right to do what they are doing.

So I won’t be running out and joining them any time soon, but I support their democratic spirit.

Proof of Concept

I really like the TRON: Legacy movie. While the plot was not exactly original, the music and the costumes were cool. Because of that, I decided I wanted to choreograph a dance to some of the music from the movie. And of course, any good dance needs a costume, so I set about building a tron-style costume. I’m going for simplicity here, since the idea has to be replicated 30x for all of the people in the dance, so super expensive intricate designs are not in the cards for this. Given that I’m not the most craftsy person, I decided to make a “proof of concept” to prove to myself that I could indeed make something that would work. Here’s what I have so far:

Basically, it’s just electroluminescent wire taped to a black shirt with medical tape. I need to actually sew the wire into the shirt at some point rather than having tape all over it, and I need to straighten the wire up a bit. I also eventually need to work on the arms and a pair of pants, but that’s less crucial since the shirt mostly gives the basic idea. More to come, but probably not in the immediate future since I have a lot of more important things to work on right now (like that whole getting a job thing…)