WontonBlog

No more hot air balloons please.

On Monday I got a call from a girl I went to High School with. I have had very little contact with her since High School, so I certainly wasn’t expecting the call. She had a very unique proposition that I would have had trouble turning down. Long story short: I’m ministering a wedding in Sterling Heights on October 2nd.

Now far be it from me to judge, but I found it rather shocking that I received only a week and a half of notice before the wedding. Could they have found someone else in that time if I was unavailable? I doubt it. Anyhow, I’ve been an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church for a long time now, and I’d waxed philosophical about the powers vested in me as a minister, but I didn’t expect to be exercising those powers anytime in the near future. I’m honored to be a part of it all though.

Wednesday I met with the bride and groom to be. All things considered, it was a horrible day, but only because I had copious amounts of homework to do that day, and the meeting by no means expedited that; I ended up working on Calculus late into the night. I did get a delicious free meal out of it at the Mongolian BBQ, so I can’t really complain.

During my dinner, I received a phone call, which due to the nature of the dinner, I ignored and promptly forgot about. I only noticed the voice mail message on my phone at about 1:30 in the morning that night. The caller: yet another Intel engineer. The saga continues to continue.

I contacted the caller, who’s name I couldn’t manage to catch, as he had a relatively heavy accent, and today, in the same day, I had my 3rd interview for a co-op with Intel. Mind you I’ve yet to hear back about the 2nd, although that interview left me feeling skeptical about the likeliness of myself getting the position. Regardless, this interview left me with many fewer qualms, as this time was nothing like the previous.

Its really been fascinating to see the varying methods employeed by the different people who’ve interviewed me. My first interview was with two people, one from technical marketing (a former software engineer), and the other an engineer. The interview went pretty much as one would expect. I had the majority of the questions ahead of time, on top of which they added a critical thinking question as well as a few technical questions when the engineer arrived (as he was not present for the first half of the interview). The engineer also happened to be a U-M alumni, and our conversation ended with discussions on football. Everything seemed to have gone pretty well, but of course, I didn’t get the position.

The second interview was with an engineer only. He asked relatively specific, highly-technical questions, a few of which I couldn’t answer, dealing with complex digital logic and pipelining, as well as assembly language, which I’ve thus far had little experience with. The questions he asked about high level languages I tore through.

Finally, in my most recent expidition through the corporate hiring process, things were far different. Again I spoke to an engineer, but instead of specific questions, he kept things broad, asking open-ended questions about classes and jobs I’ve had in the past, and spending almost as much time listening to me as explaining, in some relatively technical details, what the job would entail. While I’m not sure I got it across, the actual details of this job meshed nearly perfectly with my past experience, involving writing programatic test cases in C, programs to automate the running of the test cases, as well as perl scripts to parse and beautify technical testing logs. Cool stuff. Also, in an interesting coincidence, our conversation again ended with talk of football, although I don’t think the guy was an Alum.

As of approximately 7:45 this evening, I’ve interviewed for positions in Washington, Massachusetts, and now California. That alone is a lot for a student from a small Michigan town to swallow.

Because today wouldn’t have been interesting enough otherwise, I also had the honor of being evacuated from a gas-filled laboratory today. GG Brown Labs, where my last class of the day is held, apparantly suffered from a gas leak. There were cops with large plastic helmets wandering the halls evacuating everyone. So much for class.