Noshir has 20 minutes to finish his MP. In Cobol!
I got in to some didjeridoo again tonight. Someday I'll get the circular breathing down, but as it is not, I been focusing on just keeping a steady rhythm.
You see, at the conclusion of their guest-in-Residence shindig, Gloria and David Chynoweth have a drum jam. Fun fun right? Yeah, drums, didj's, and just an all-around nice time. I can still hear it now going on at 2342h although I've since retired.
And upstairs in the main lounge is IVCF holding just a big hang-out thing. Christians just don't fascinate me as much as they did two years ago.
Behind me is Emily Huang, frantically trying to squeeze that last problem out of her overdue Mathematica homework, wishing James Ho were around to give her a hand.
And here I am, trying to figure out life, as usual.
I went to the ACM job fair today. Well, actually it's part of the conference that I signed up to volunteer for. (I be workin' tomorrow.) Anyways diz morning I dropped by and Christy Schumacher encouraged me to hob-knob, and drop off copies of my resume.
So after lunch, I changed. I got "dressed up" and donned my tie-dyed "Layman's Glossary of Computer Terms" tee-shirt. And it worked. After attending a Nike protest over by Swanlund, I biked up to DCL, took off my overshirts, and strutted in, greeted by the State Farm people with considerable interest. (I can catch an eye you know?)
State Farm, a company that's in to library systems, Lucent Technologies. I think the best experience was with ComEd, where I got to talk to a Unix guy in Information Services named Joe. He was a short, personable, Indian dude who I think is a UI graduate. Anyways, they can use interns, and the kinda sweet thing is they're in downtown Chicago.
Joe himself struck me as an interesting guy. He seemed especially interested in the fact that I included my homepage on my resume. It doesn't seem at all unusual for me, but I can't help but wonder if maybe ComEd might for some reason more naturally attract Electrical Engineering folks rather than Computer Science. But then, being a Rhetoric major, he may have placed greater idea on personal expression.
I dropped by Kinkos beforehand and got my resume whipped out on to fancy paper. Ran out too, but I think I covered all the interesting companies.
An interesting question is whether to introduce myself "Well, actually I'm a Rhetoric major." (A what?) I think it better to start of with "I am minoring in CS .." and then build up to the interesting bits.
Actually, I think I can tell what sort of company I'd be better accultured to by the way in which recruiters react to my ... unique position? One guy, he wanted to know if I did in fact code. Of course I do! I need to stress that not only can I express myself proficiently in English, but that I actually have a broad range of skills and interests - networking, web work, code, and most suitably perhaps documentation and support.
Joe, with ComEd, mentioned that the IS part of the company, as is common in a non-computer company, is in the end a service organization. Yup, NetDev is under Computing and Communications, which is pretty much a very large segment of NCSA devoted to servicing the requirements of the applications and research groups. In private enterprise, that's the "revenue" part of the picture. I wonder if support folks get cut first by the corporate overlords when they wanna increase profits. (I just wonder that coz it came up ComEd is owned by a holding company, the thought of which seemed vaguely threatening.)
Anyways, as a result, I seemed to hit it off better with the non-computer companies that really just have large in-house computer support organizations. State Farm, and ComEd, for example, being more interested than say, Hewlett Packard, SGI, and IBM. (I gave Microsoft wide berth of course!)
State Farm seemed concerned at my GPA though. That did strike me as slightly queer. A job fair though doesn't seem like a great place to expound on your crackpot theories of how grades work.
Lucent was kind of interesting too. They're business is the over-arching thing of "communications" ... hmm, funny, a lot of my studies focus on communications and technology. Something seemed appropriate. Lucent offers some potential as their areas intersect with my interests. The cool thing is they're bizarrely huge, but don't seem to have that corporate stench, yet ... and they gots locations all over.
Yeah, the happy corner was the lady from Lucent followed by ComEd Joe. Ahh, and between the two, they covered Chicago, and the rest of the world.
11 October
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