Definitely Maybe

Hello again. It is t-minus one month until graduation and then this grand adventure called grad school comes to an end. The obvious question that has been asked and is popping up at least for me is what I am going to do after graduation. That is a good question. I'm not sure at this point. Well, I do have an offer from CapGemini to be based out of Chicago but due to recent events, I think it would much better if I was out on the West Coast near Jinah and my friends. So with that in mind, I applied to the big three, at least in e-commerce field, eBay, Amazon and Google. And surprisingly I got interviews with them. More on that in a little bit. I should mention that I did interview at Oracle during spring break and did all right on three out of the four people I interviewed with. Unfortunately, the one person I really tanked out was the guy that most mattered. So sue me if I don't know my statistical methods and cognitive psychology concepts. Who cares about external bias anyway? Well, apparently people at Oracle do.

I did have done two phone interviews with eBay, which I think went well. I am supposed to hear back from them in the next week or so. I also did two phone interviews with Amazon. I think the next step for either of those is to fly out and do an on-site interview. Oh a good tip is that if you know who you are going to interview with, make sure to Google them. I googled one of the guys at eBay and I found his website, portfolio and blog. Definitely helpful. It was definitely helpful when I ironically interviewed at Google. I googled the name of the person that interviewed me and turns she is a major name in the field of HCI. One of my former professors also knows her so he was able to put in a good word for me. Google is a good tool to prep for job interviews, especially if you are interviewing with Google. But enough about this job search stuff, what else is going on.

I have been busy lately with my career services job. Last Thursday, Tonya and I conducted our first workshop. Most of the events until then, I have helped organized but usually have been conducted or facilitated by others. This was the first event that either of us have planned and executed by ourselves. Turn out was actually better than anyone expected. It was workshop to prepare for the Employer Information Fair that was held yesterday. Which is why yesterday was a pretty hectic day for me since I was working registration for the fair and then had work and present my eCommunities posters at the SI Exposition. Unlike last year, where Erika, Cameron, and I busted our asses to make a kick-ass poster, my poster this year was merely a requirement to fulfill for eCommunities so I didn't put that much effort into it. As a result, I got severely shown up by everyone else. In related news, Sylvie and I were at the HCI break-out session for this years Visiting Days. Not that I care much about the incoming students, but they needed somebody to do it. However, I don't know how much Sylvie or I represent the average experience of a HCI student in our program. Erika, Noor, and I also got to see an on-campus screening of the Grace Lee Project, which is a documentary about a filmmaker (named Grace Lee) who tracks down other Grace Lees (since there seems to be so many of them) and sees how different their lives are. It is a pretty funny and interesting movie. I recommend it. They also shot parts of it near where I went to junior high/high school in Cupertino, CA (home of Apple Computer btw). For the record, I did know a couple Grace Lees in high school but they spelled their last names differently (ie. Li, Lih)

Classes are pretty much the same as they have been with a few exceptions. I fell asleep in ICOS this past week due to the room being overheated and the lecturer being extra extra boring. Thankfully, NotLiz woke me up before my snoring made a major disturbance. Not even crazy Japanese ICOS dude could keep me awake for that lecture. Also I had a major assignment due in Information Seeking Behavior which was a field notes exercise. Basically, you had to go to a place (coffee shop, library, etc) and observed people's behavior and write field notes on what you are observing. Seeing that I did not want to be conventional and do what people have done in the past, I decided to observe Bubble Island, the pearl tea place that I have repeatedly said is not very good but I still go to since it is the only game in town. For the assignment, we had to observe a place for around 7 to 8 hours. So on three days, I sat myself down and watched people at Bubble Island. In the process of doing this, I must have drank like five bubble teas which can't be good for my health. However, it was not all bad since Bubble Island's major customer base seems to be composed of hot undergraduate Asian girls, who I got to observe for many hours. Other interesting things of note is that many people forget to mention if they want bubbles with their tea which I can only assume that they forgot because they assumed their tea would come with bubbles since the place is called Bubble Island.

Anyway, I should hit the hay pretty soon. Take care everyone and until next time, peace.