Day 1 - April 1, 2016

I decided to chronicle my experiences in the job search and life in general for two reasons.

1. It keeps me motivated to do something
2. It would help others who are trying to search for a job and perhaps others can learn from my mistakes.

So here goes.

I had a couple of informational interviews today. Given that I'm trying for both PM and Operations jobs, I spoke to alums from Nest, Avaya and Prosper Marketplace. The general advice from people was that I need to be more focused on my job search. The alum from Nest told me that an operations job was very different at a hardware company when compared to a software company and asked me to speak to people at Apple, which looks like it doesn't care much about previous background. She did not offer to refer me. After our conversation, I realized that my experience was not a good fit for Nest, and I decided to stop networking there.

The alum from Avaya asked me to do research on certain companies and was willing to put me in touch with people at those companies. The alum from Prosper said that I need to seek a PM role after MBA and taking up any other role would hurt my chances later. She was willing to refer me as well.

Also, one alum from IBM said he can't refer me to roles because I didn't seem to be focused in my job search, meaning I was trying to apply to roles that had no connection with my previous experience, my MBA and what I was trying to do in the future. Oh, well. 

I also made an awesome connection with a PM from GitHub. She is simply amazing and was very sweet in answering questions I put forth to her. She suggested that I brush up on technical skills, including learning Ruby on Rails and Python.

One person from our career management center reached out asking if I need help. I have always found nothing useful came out of the conversations with the career management center and they have usually been a waste of time. When I do meet them, they ask me to share the contacts of the alums that have been helpful so that they can pass that on to other students. Why they don't do their job and try to be of use to students is a mystery to me. 

On the other hand, I also have moved to the next round at a travel brokerage company and hope I can do the next round of interview well. This is on April 12th.

I went for a long swim today. To be honest, my roommate was playing a movie very loudly and I found myself getting irritated, so I thought best thing to do now is to get out of the house and go for a swim. I find myself in better spirits now, much much better than I was this morning. I will definitely go for a swim everyday.