Career Angst
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Spent this morning in the first session of the Job Acceleration Work Group, learning “the secrets of the on-campus interviewing process and how to prepare efficiently”. Yikes. The array of events and things-to-do over the course of the next couple of months, and the breakneck pace at which the whole thing happens, is dizzying. I guess it’s “welcome to the business world”. Things don’t move at the academician’s snail’s pace outside of this ivory prison.
My first and highest-priority task is to get my resume together, and approved by one of the career counselors at a drop-in session early next week, and submitted to Amy to be eligible to join the JAWG. This shouldn’t be too hard, since I have a (hopefully) passable generic resume thanks to the (botched) BCG program application; and since I don’t have a clue yet what sort of jobs I’ll apply to, I can’t tailor it to any particular one yet.
I subscribed to the Office of Career Services calendar via iCal, which has suddenly transformed from a sparsely peppered to densely crowded. I joined the mailing list for the Graduate Consulting Club—I know, I know, consulting may not be the best path, but it seems prudent to familiarize myself with some of the language and culture of the business world if I’m considering interviewing for any sort of job in a private enterprise, and where better to immerse oneself in jargon and business-speak than amongst would-be consultants. I also finally (finally!) wrote the first follow-up email to the energy & environment job fair. This, shockingly, happened all the way back in March (!!), but better late than never, I suppose.
In an effort to do at least one thing research-related before the day was out, I managed to figure out how to separate out groups of points to be plotted in the morphospace and assign them different colors (harder than one might think). But this gave me a little bit of hope, at least, that there was something to the spread of my data—since the pennate diatoms (bilaterally symmetrical things) and the centric diatoms (the others) seem to fall into sorta-separate areas… so it’s not totally garbage after all—perhaps. Here, the plot:
