Today, during my Personal Finance class, we had a guest lecturer talk about interviewing, networking and all those things I have been training to do since early sophomore year. One girl (not a ditzy girl, even), asked: "What do we do when we feel that we are being grilled in the interview? Like, it is not a conversation, but question after question?"
I about fell off my chair. An interview is, by definition, supposed to be questions. If it happens to become a good conversation, great! But that is not the point of an interview. In my many interviews for full time positions over last semester, I got grilled about my Computer Science and programming skills. And I expected nothing else.
Maybe I am overreacting, but I think that a senior from Cornell University should have enough self-confidence to know that such interviews occur and to be able to handle them, without feeling threatened. Furthermore, such opportunities should be embraced and used to prove what one is capable of doing under pressure. The interviewer sets the tone of the entire interview. If the interviewer wants to simply question and receive answers, that does not mean that: (1) the company sucks, (2) the interviewer is inferior, (3) you are not being treated fairly, or any other silly excuse to avoid assigning fault to yourself.
-Szymon
Monday, February 5, 2007
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
First Post
This is yet another one of my attempts to start a blog. I believe that I have gained enough experience during my four years at Cornell, to be able to comment some of the issues going on in technology and my surroundings.
But first, a bit about myself. I was born in Poland and raised in Puerto Rico, where I went to school. I then moved to Ithaca, NY to attend school at Cornell University majoring in Computer Science, while studying for a minor in Operations Research and Information Engineering. I was part of the CUAUV team for one year and have accumulated a total of seven months of experience as an intern at Amazon.com, with experience in Supply Chain and in Amazon Web Services. I work as a developer for Cornell Information Technologies supporting various web apps written in PHP and Ruby (Rails). I am also a TA for the project course associated with the Cornell Operating Systems class. I will graduate in May, and in July I will start out as a Consultant in New York City, working for Infusion Development.
I will leave you with that introduction and I hope you find this blog as enjoyable as I hope it is going to be to be writing it.
-Szymon
But first, a bit about myself. I was born in Poland and raised in Puerto Rico, where I went to school. I then moved to Ithaca, NY to attend school at Cornell University majoring in Computer Science, while studying for a minor in Operations Research and Information Engineering. I was part of the CUAUV team for one year and have accumulated a total of seven months of experience as an intern at Amazon.com, with experience in Supply Chain and in Amazon Web Services. I work as a developer for Cornell Information Technologies supporting various web apps written in PHP and Ruby (Rails). I am also a TA for the project course associated with the Cornell Operating Systems class. I will graduate in May, and in July I will start out as a Consultant in New York City, working for Infusion Development.
I will leave you with that introduction and I hope you find this blog as enjoyable as I hope it is going to be to be writing it.
-Szymon
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