You know it’s the end of the interview when...

Last Tuesday night I flew down to D.C. for my LAST interview. I left the hotel early on Wednesday morning to beat traffic and made it to the site early enough to run through the presentation I had to give just one more time in the car. I didn’t have a lot to eat that morning because I was a little nervous and didn’t have much of an appetite, but it was only going to be a morning interview, so I figured I’d have plenty of time for lunch afterward.

The interview was pretty low-key. I met with the group supervisor for about an hour, then he took me on a two-hour tour of their lab facilities. After that we went back to his office and talked a little bit more, then he rounded up the rest of his group to be an audience for my presentation. We finished around noon, and since the interview was essentially over, I was now really looking forward to eating lunch. But the supervisor asked me if I’d be interested in talking with some other people in the group to get a better idea of what they do on a daily basis, so to be the good interviewee, I said yes.

We started walking down the hall toward another guy’s office and the supervisor started telling me about his recent LASIK surgery. He went into all kinds of gory detail about the procedure and how his eyes felt like they were on fire afterward as we strolled down the hall. I started to feel a little light-headed by the time we got to the office - I reached out for the doorframe to steady myself, but before I could sit down, I started getting tunnel vision.

The next thing I knew, I was flat on the floor on my back. Apparently I passed out and fell straight backwards. In the process, I guess I dumped the rest of my cup of water onto myself, the floor, and my interviewer (let’s call him Bob). As I was lying down, getting my bearings, I overheard ambulance sirens and Bob told me that he had called the paramedics. When they got to the building, they stormed right in and put me in the neck collar, on the backboard, and rushed me into the ambulance. I gave my medical history and the description of the kind of pain I was in to at least five different people.

I’ve fainted before, so this all seemed like a really big fuss for something that wasn't really a big deal. But by the time I was velcroed into the collar and on the board, it was a little late to say no. They took me to a nearby hospital, where I had an EKG, a chest CT, and gave away large amounts of bodily fluids. It took four different nurses and 9 different “sticks” to get enough blood drawn for the tests and to get an IV in for the iodine they had to inject as dye for the chest CT.

When I was in high school, I had to get a tuberculosis test before I could volunteer at the local hospital. When I went to my doctor’s office to get tested, the nurse there chuckled as she jabbed the stubby needle into my arm a couple times. “Gosh, you’ve got tough skin!” she said. As the second nurse at the hospital last week was trying to draw blood out of my shriveled veins, I told her what the other nurse had told me back in high school. “Well,” she said, “it might sound silly, but you really do have tough skin.”

It was sort of a toss-up which was more uncomfortable: getting poked with needles over and over or getting the chest CT. The actual scan didn’t hurt, but the iodine has to go into your veins quickly right before the scan, and that burns when it goes in. It makes you feel warm all over and kind of like you peed in your pants...

A little while after I originally got to the hospital, Bob showed up to make sure that I was okay. It was nice of him to come, since it sucks to be in the hospital by yourself, but then he started asking me questions about my desired salary range and telling me about how his company does all sorts of unique work. I nodded along for a while, mostly because it was nice to have a distraction from all the trouble my tough skin was causing, but later on, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I have no interest in interviewing in a hospital gown, no matter what job it’s for.

I finally managed to convince Bob that he didn’t have to feel bad about leaving me in the hospital, so for a while I just slept on my bed in the hallway while I waited for my test results (only the really sick or injured people got rooms). I was exhausted with all the drama of the day and my missing blood. When I woke up, magically, Josh was there.



I went home with a mostly clean bill of health; thankfully, no serious cause for the fainting. And luckily, the HR department at the company was very generous in re-booking me a flight home the next day and not complaining when I brought the rental car back late.

One of the nurses from the hospital asked me if my chances of getting the job were better or worse after fainting. I have no idea, but I’m not sure I could take the job even if I got an offer, just out of sheer embarrassment from the whole mess.

Just a couple more

This coming week I have two more interviews, and regardless of how they turn out, they will be the LAST interviews that I go on in the foreseeable future.

The first one is a quick on-campus interview with a large aerospace & defense company. I applied online several months ago and honestly, had basically forgotten about it. I'm not holding out much hope that the interview will lead to anything though. Even if everything goes well and I get a second round interview, I don't think it would happen before I have to make a decision on my other job offers. I'm also not convinced that I'm going to be thrilled about the work, or that I'll even learn any specifics about it very soon.

The second one is on Wednesday with a government agency that I'm much more interested in possibly working for. The only twist about this interview is that I have to give a short presentation at the end. Since it's only supposed to be 15-20 minutes, talking about my thesis wouldn't really be appropriate - it would take much too long to get into any useful detail. Plus, I'd have to make a new set of slides. Yuck.

I'd much rather give an old presentation from a project that I've worked on it the past. My best choice, I think, would be a presentation that I gave toward the end of my year of full-time work. Over the past couple days, I started to panic because I couldn't find the presentation, or anything else that I saved from my time in Houston. It wasn't on my hard drive and I worried that I had been dumb enough to not take any of the work I had done with me when I left.

It turns out that I'm just bad at keeping things organized. Earlier tonight I found the CD with all my work data on it, so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use one of the presentations for this interview. The lesson to be learned from this is KEEP YOUR WORK! You'll never know when you might need it again. Save big presentations, save your personal records of what you worked on (for example, we wrote "activity reports" every week to turn in to the boss), and save contact information. I copied down email addresses and phone numbers from several people that I worked with, and I've referred to it so many times since I left that I wish I had been smart enough to do that at all the places I've worked in the past.

Virginia weekend

Last Friday I had another interview with a company in Virginia that I used to work for as a summer intern. It's been several years since I was back there, but it was really nice to see so many of my former coworkers. I got a lot of, "Melanie! Are you back??" "No, just interviewing..."

Any nervousness I had about the whole thing disappeared after my conversation with the second person I interviewed with. I had asked what to expect in this process after my interview today, like when I should expect to hear back from them, and what would happen if I liked both groups I was interviewing with and they both liked me. His response: "Let me just tell you now - unless you punch someone in the face this morning, you're going to get an offer from us."

I convinced the company's travel office to let me stay until Sunday morning instead of flying back on Friday afternoon, so I got to spend the rest of the weekend with Josh. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Phil and Glenn at the Boulevard Woodgrill, then stuck around the area to grab a beer and then go to a party that Josh's friend was throwing. The theme of the party was white trash, and everyone got really into it, so we drank Milwaukee's Best and ate Slim Jims and peanuts. Everyone had dressed the part too. Everyone, that is, except us. It's remarkable how out of place you can feel in normal clothes when everyone else is wearing ripped up wifebeaters, ratty sweatpants or shorts, construction boots, and enormous hoop earrings. One girl even came with a fake pregnant belly.

Saturday was a lot less interesting. I worked on my thesis, Josh worked on his homework, we ran some errands, and we watched the final episode of Band of Brothers. I haven't started the book yet, but I think I have to retract my statement about the book always being better than the movie. First of all, this series is 10 hours long, so you don't have to worry about story lines getting chopped off or cut out because they don't fit into 2.5 hours. Second, there are some scenes (mostly gruesome ones) that just couldn't be conveyed as powerfully through words. There's a significant amount of narration throughout the series, but there are many scenes, particularly the ones where Easy Company is in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, where narration is completely unnecessary, and in many cases would have taken away from the impact of the scene.

After a long delay at the airport the next morning, I returned to Boston to get back to my boring life: grocery shopping, unpacking, post-interview thank-you emails, and of course, watching the OC episode that I missed from Thursday. :)

Yesterday was a fun-filled day out in Natick, MA. My all-day interview started out well, but it sort of went downhill in the afternoon. The company is small - around 1,600 employees - and it seems to take care of its employees very well. Example: to celebrate the company's 15 year anniversary, the co-founders flew everyone (around 500 employees at the time) to the Bahamas. !! For the 20 year anniversary, the destination was Disneyland. Craziness. They also have some other cute perks that usually only small, private companies offer: free breakfast on Wednesdays, free cookies on Friday afternoons, free coffee/tea/soda (I didn't think this was a "perk" until I started working in the world of government and their contractors and had to pay 40¢ per cup of coffee), and a on-site gym open 24 hours.

At the beginning of the day, with all the introductions, overviews, and HR interviews, it seemed like this would be a really neat place to work. I would get a lot of experience using the company's products as tech support personnel, and the other half of my time would be spent working on projects that would improve the software, create demos for customers, or create tools for a particular company's application.

I had my technical interview in the afternoon though, and that made my enthusiasm for this job wane a little. The interview lasted about two hours, and we covered the same types of material as in my phone interview: basic algebra/calculus, programming concepts, C programming, this company's software, and control theory. I already didn't feel like I did well over the phone, and this time everything was covered much more in-depth. After that part of the interview, I was mentally exhausted. All I wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes.

That wasn't the only thing that squashed my enthusiasm. At the end of the day, a couple of former members of the group that we all were interviewing for talked to us about the projects they've been working on since they left the group. Granted, their interests weren't along quite the same lines as mine, but I still wasn't overly excited about the types of things they were doing.

I went into this interview thinking it would be a really good experience for me because I haven't had any technical interviews before, even though I wasn't considering the company really seriously because of the location. But then when I learned more, it seemed like it would be a pretty neat place to work, so I was really trying to make it known that I was interested in their Washington, D.C. field office. But then as I learned even more, I'm feeling more like this job wouldn't be a great fit for me. Too much controls, too little aerospace.

I'm supposed to find out from them on Monday or Tuesday whether they want to make me an offer. I'm not very optimistic about my chances, and I'm not terribly excited about working there anymore, but I don't think either of those will make the rejection phone call any easier.

Last month I had a phone interview with a company that makes engineering software. This company is to engineering software what Microsoft is to operating systems, although to my knowledge, this company has no direct competitor. So needless to say, I was floored to get a call from them and hear that they liked my resume.

That feeling lasted until about four weeks ago, which is when I actually had the phone interview. It was technical interview, which I'd never had before, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from friends and co-workers, so I'd determined that it's basically the pee-in-your-pants type of interview because typically one of the following two things occurs: either they ask you to derive some really advanced concept that you can't even pronouce, so you have to fess up and say that you have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, or worse, they ask you something completely fundamental and straight forward but you have an enormous brain fart and draw a complete blank on the answer. Either way, chances of you looking like an idiot are high.

Anyway, well before this interview, I was told what general topics we'd cover:

1. Basic math (algebra and calculus)
2. Computer programming concepts
3. One programming language (C, C++, or Java)
4. This company's own software/programming language
5. Signal processing or controls

When my interviewer called, he skipped all the usual chit chat at the beginning and got right down to business.

Question #1: "What is an even function?"
Me: %*&@!!! "Uh... um... Well, I know that cosine is an even function!"

And it just went downhill from there. I think that was the only "basic math" question that I really boned, but C programming didn't go swimmingly either. If he had asked me those questions this time two years ago, I would have been all over the answers about pointers, addresses, and #include files; however, since I've been programming exclusively NOT in C over the past two years, that section of my brain has since been overwritten. The only section that I didn't screw up was the one about this company's own software.

It was too bad, since after all the embarrassment, the guy answered some of my questions and it turns out that the job seems pretty neat. You could certainly spend the majority of your time coding if you wanted, but you could also work on demos for customers, go to trade shows, and lead training sessions for engineers in industry.

So you can imagine my surprise when I got a call back the next day saying that I passed the phone interview. All I could gather from this is that they're apparently looking for people who can a) operate a telephone, and b) not curse on said telephone when asked basic questions to which they don't know the answer. The next step is the on-site interview, which happens this Friday. And yes, there will be more technical questions. So yes, I will be studying!

In doing some online Christmas shopping tonight, I realized that I don't really have many hobbies anymore. At least, any hobbies that require purchasable stuff. I blame this on school. In many of my interviews over the past couple months, I've been asked how I feel about going back to school, continuing my education, etc. Obviously, the correct answer to this question is that I would always be open to getting more education, especially if it would benefit The Company and myself in my job.

Except... this is absolutely the worst time of the year to ask a student how they feel about continuing their education. I have to bite my tongue to stop from yelling, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME??" When faced with all the final projects, extra reading, last problem sets, and final exams that this time of year has to offer, I just can't imagine subjecting myself to another round of school. And yet, somehow by the time the beginning of the next semester rolls around, choosing new classes always seems exciting again. "Ah, THIS semester I'll get all my work done on time, do the reading before class, never fall asleep in lecture, and ask lots of questions when I don't understand the material."

But that feeling usually lasts about two weeks.

Anyway, I also think my lack of interest in stuff outside of school has a lot to do with my eyes. A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend who had just gotten into kayaking - he was taking classes in the pool to learn how to safely roll a kayak, and he was spending most of his weekends on the water in Maine. He was also playing IM soccer, hockey, softball... As he was talking, I realized that I can't do any of those things right now because I'm wearing my glasses. Yeah, okay, I could get one of those uber cool rubber straps that goes around the back of my head to keep my glasses on while I ran around, but my eyesight isn't good enough to do any of those things without my contacts. And I still can't wear contacts for any real portion of the day (although it might be okay if I just had them in for a 90 minute soccer game). I haven't even been interested in doing any photography for the school paper since I stopped wearing contacts.

Around Thanksgiving, I made an appointment Josh's eye doctor because Josh and I were having similar eye symptoms, so I wanted to know if it could be from a virus or something else that we both had. The doc didn't think that was the case, but he spent almost an hour just talking with me and listening to my description of everything that's been happening since last March. He examined my eyes and tried to flip my eyelids inside out to check for giant papillary conjunctivitis (unsuccessfully, because I'm a big baby), and ultimately determined the following:

I probably had a mild case of GPC early last spring, and I also had a severe allergic reaction to an unknown something while I was in England. The unrelated medication that I was on taking up until the end of this September probably changed the pH of my skin (causing the weird acne I was getting) and of my eyes. Inflammation in the eyes, particularly if it's prolonged, can cause changes in the cornea, making it more difficult for the eyes to stay moisturized. The good news is that since it's been so long since I wore contacts on a regular basis, any GPC that I had is probably gone. It's also possible to help my eyes get better at keeping the moisture level up, by doing obvious things like drinking lots of water and washing my eyelids with very mild soap, and also by eating more foods that have omega-3 fatty acids. Fish are a big source of this, which is unfortunate since I hate fish, but flaxseed is also a decent source of these fatty acids. So I've diligently been eating my flaxseed every day.

I'm also supposed to lay off the coffee and soda, and get as much sleep as I can. So with that, good night.

I've started a bunch of posts over the past couple weeks and never got the chance to actually finish and post any of them, so now I'm writing one of those posts that's just, "Yes, I'm alive, just busy."

So, there it is. I'm still around, just crazily cramming everything in before the end of the semester next Wednesday. I've got one more project and one more final exam, then this stupid semester is finally done. It'll be nice to actually remember what I'm doing for my thesis after that. It's definitely gotten the short end of the stick recently.

My interview last Friday in Maryland went pretty well, I think. It was a 10 hour day, but it was worth it to talk with as many people as I could about their work. The majority of the groups that I interviewed with do missile work for the military, but I did manage to get an interview with the space group as well. I was expecting to be pretty ho-hum about the military work and really excited about the space stuff, but my actual response was the opposite. I did interview with the space group really late in the day, so I'm sure that was a factor, but it just didn't grab me like I thought it would. I was actually a lot more interested in some of the missile work, as well as the opportunities to travel and interface with some big names in Washington.

The tricky part is that now I have to rank my group choices for the HR department. Overall, the company would be a fantastic place to work (hello, $2 for $1 company 401(k) matching!), and I think I would be happy moving between several different groups over the next several years to try out many types of work. There's one group I could throw out, but that still leaves 5 for me to rank. And I have no idea.

Maryland

Free trip to DC! The only catch is that I have to go to an interview. Just kidding! I'm interviewing with a company in Maryland at the end of next month, and I just got off the phone with their travel office to make my arrangements. It seems like a really good company to work for - their representatives at the career fair were incredibly nice, and they couldn't stop talking in these amazed voices about all the benefits that their company provides. It's a relatively small place, which I like, and they're a non-profit, which I also like.

The only downside is that I think the work may be a little too established for my taste. The projects seem to be very long-term, at least in the fields that I'm interested in, and due to the nature of the work, relatively inflexible to big innovations or other things that might gamble with the reliability of the system. But this is all what I've heard from other people, so it'll be interesting to find out what the deal is for myself. I'm just not looking forward to the 8 hours of interviewing.

The last time I flew to an on-site interview was three years ago, and it was really stressful. Spending the afternoon, evening, and following morning in a hotel room by myself was really unnerving, and I spent the entire time just getting nervous about everything that was coming up. It was a half-day affair in which each of the interviewees got passed around between several different employees, but I completely relaxed by about the third interview when it became abundantly clear that I didn't want to do the types of jobs that they were hiring for.

I'm hoping the Maryland interview will go well, but I'm also hoping that I might be a little more relaxed, considering that right now I don't think it's the job that I'm dying to have. But I'll have to try hard to remember that when I'm sitting in my hotel room alone, getting nervous.

Space debris

I was doing some research this afternoon on the company that I'm interviewing with on Tuesday, and they have a short animation on their website that shows all the tracked objects that are in orbit around the Earth. It's really crowded out there! Okay, yes, I understand that it looks more crowded because it's a 3D projection onto a flat screen, but still! It would be interesting to know which ones are actually in use and which ones are just space junk.

Interviews

I have two interviews scheduled for tomorrow!! Both are with defense/intelligence companies. When I budgeted time to go to the career fair today though, I forgot about the time that I would spend catching up with old friends who are now recruiting for their companies. :) I love running into people I haven't seen in a long time, and somehow none of those conversations today felt contrived or fake. I wish I knew how to surround myself with more people like that - friendly people who tell it like it is. No sugar, no fake smiles, no exaggeration of how close we were when we went to school together. I'm sure it helped that several of these friends worked for companies that I have no interest in working for, so they didn't have to give me their regular recruiting pitch. And it helps that we've all grown up a little bit.

One of the things I disliked the most about my first full time job was the fact that there was very little communication from the management. Everything was rumors. I would hear about agency changes from news headlines and blogs before, if ever, I would hear anything from my supervisor or the head of the agency. News of new projects would go like this: "There's been a buzz about some new work coming down the pipe..." I hated that. "Down the pipe?" It seemed like no one person or group was ever associated with a particular policy change or analysis request. I felt acutely aware of just how big the gap was between the decision makers (them) and the lowly laborers (us). To be fair, it's an extremely large workforce, so all-hands meetings to explain changes or answer questions are often unrealistic. And it's a government agency, so engineering development and Congressional policy get tangled up as motivations for change.

I didn't realize how much I disliked that type of company communication until just a few weeks ago. The engineering VP of my current employer sat down with each group individually (15-20 of us) and discussed how things around the lab would be changing with our new president coming in, what hiring changes were happening, how the company was growing, what new projects were coming in, and why current groups and divisions are set up the way they are. He explained things as they were, even if that meant admitting some shortcomings or areas in which the company needed to improve. And when he was finished talking, he spent the next 45 minutes fielding questions from our group. Granted, it's a lot easier to do that sort of thing with a smaller company, and I'm sure that the VP lost a complete day or two just going around to all the different groups to explain the same things over and over. But at least for me, that sort of communication has an incredible boost on my morale and feeling of worth in the company. It's nice to be informed, and it's nice to feel like your suggestions or questions have at least some, however small, impact on how things are done.