Siliceous and Delicious

Settled down at Darwin’s this morning to stay out of the rain and away from the office, where that uncertain new officemate awaits (or might await, who knows). Caught up on scheduling my week, decided not to go to the graduate consulting club this evening (it’s just not me—I don’t want to be on campus for an event starting at 7:30 pm unless it’s something I’m really passionate about, and I guess consulting case prep just isn’t one of those things). Decided that since Google is the one employer coming to the career fair on Friday that I’m seriously interested in working for, I’d look into what branches of the business I’d actually be interested in.

They have a /edu section to their website, which touts a variety of products and applications but did not give me the sense that there was an actual business unit dedicated to education or education-specific technology. In a blog post about their Boston office there were, likewise, several educationy-related activities outlined, but they mostly seemed to be something the resident engineers and programmers did on the side, rather than as their main job function. Read through all the job postings in Boston—it seems what they’re looking for here is experienced salespeople for management positions, or computer programmers. That’s not me. Not clear where or how their google.org type of jobs actually exist, and whether there are actually any positions dedicated in an educational direction. Hmmm.

The exploration left me a little bit disillusioned, although it’s always possible to take the sort of approach that Evan suggested, those many months ago—choose the company, and decide what position they need to create for you… I’ll have a chat to the Google person on Friday and try to scope them out a little.

Eventually did a bit of work, though interrupted by a horror story from second year Steven Jaret (who just failed his quals) and another rub-it-in defense by a fellow G6, Jenny. Found that, though time, there is basically no pattern in the expansion of morphospace. Fuck a duck. Yucky, yucky, yuck. Makes me sick. Here’s the depressing plot:

Well, that’s not good. I’m going home. What a steaming pile of dung.