Finally Found a Direction?

NOTE THAT THIS POST IS STICKIED TO THE TOP OF MY BLOG FOR EXPOSURE. NEW BLOG ENTRIES WILL ALWAYS BE THE SECOND POST ON THE FRONT PAGE!

As I walked across the stage on Saturday, May 16th, during the graduation for History majors at Virginia Tech, I couldn’t have been happier. I was receiving a bachelors degree from one of the top schools in the country. It didn’t take me more than the time that was expected, I had never failed a class, and while I had had fun in between the studying and paper writing, I had succeeded. But it was a little bit bitter-sweet when I thought about it more. As with many college seniors (or, now, recent graduates) I was graduating into a job market that was the worst witnessed in MY short lifetime and I did not have a job – or even more than one interview – yet. To make matters worse, I HAD been searching for jobs that were of interest but even the entry level jobs had requirements of two years or a masters degree. I found myself asking what good it had done spending almost 100 thousand dollars in out-of-state tuitions if I would graduate with nothing but paper to show for it.

Growing Up Will Lead to Changes Here

The market and inability to find a job has slapped me and many others in the face. Some have already adjusted, others are resisting the inevitable, and I truly believe that I’ve been sitting in the middle of either end of the spectrum since the beginning of my final semester. On one end, I knew that finding a job would be next to impossible by the time May rolled into town, on the other end I held out hope that it would only be a few more months before things evened out. With that said, it has nothing to do with growing up. Many view the act of growing up in different ways. Some see it as getting a career and maintaining/advancing in it, some see it as a number (age) and look at it as a combination of multiple factors.

A Frustrating Process and Revelations of the Work Force

Lately the job hunting process has become far more frustrating, disheartening and depressing. On Friday I received an automated email from the first company (agency) I interviewed with saying I had been disqualified for not having the requirements necessary (specifically my GPA). It represents a fundamental flaw in the governmental hiring process though. The application was essentially the second round of the process with the first being the phone interview. To make matters worse, not only had my resume been pulled without me applying, but I had done well enough in the phone interview to receive an application.

iPads Make Me Slack

I’m on a bit of a mini vacation so I went back into not posting for a little bit. The first part involved going to Raleigh, NC for about 4 days to see the town, decide if I want to move there, and also attend WordCamp Raleigh on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday I did not end up attending as I had a cold and a massive earache upon waking up (it was also raining quite heavily early on and I had a 7.5 hour drive back to Atlanta that day). WordCamp was interesting. It was my first one and I can say that a lot of the information was useful. While I do not run my own business I can’t say that the information isn’t able to be applied to other situations where you would be using your blog or helping a company promote their website and build their brand and business. It was definitely worth my time.

Phone Interview Number 2

I had phone interview number two today. It went pretty well but I still feel as if I’m only marginally better at the phone interview style. I prefer face to face and there’s some amount of disconnect if I’m trying to sell myself based on voice, cadence and what I can actually say in a 20 minute conversation. I won’t say the company until I know if I got the job or got denied but I will say that it’s a sales job. I have three years of experience in customer service so sales as a whole is somewhat easy at this point but quota based sales has never been something I’ve done. The fact that it was quota based and I’ve only had regular sales and customer service experience seemed to be the interviewer’s biggest concern. I can’t fault her for that but everyone’s got to start somewhere, right? I think I nailed the question about if I could keep up in that sort of environment though and maybe that coupled with at least a little bit of experience and a college degree will help me in the long run. I feel as if I did better on this one than the first one but I guess we’ll see in a few days.

First Interview

Just had my first job interview….period…of my life. Well for jobs that don’t involve asking if that’ll be all and then hitting a button on a cash register. I felt as if it went well but could’ve been much better. Overall I can at least take from it a set of things to expect in future interviews. I won’t find out until the end of May if I got anything but I’m ok with that, the next few weeks will be busy anyway with finals, graduation, family stuff and more.  Have to admit I was a bit nervous though.

Still Getting into a Groove

I still can’t seem to get into the whole blogging thing but I really am trying. Seeing that this is public it’s a bit hard for me to talk about personal stuff and since all I really do is go to class, go to work, and then come back here to sit around, I don’t really have much to update about. Things are starting to fall back out of place and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I was 95% sure I was moving back to Atlanta just last week and now I don’t even know if it’s in my top 3.

April 16, 2010

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years already. I’m currently typing this in my basement at home in Atlanta, 425+ miles from the room of Vawter Hall where I sat up in my bunk bed to a phone call at around 10:20 am. The call was from my mom and she was, surprisingly, not at all nervous or distraught sounding given the news she was about to deliver.

Updating more

I want to start updating this thing more. Nothing long, just a snippit about what I did during the day, something I see that interests me, etc.

Public Waves and Their Internet Impact

While my last blog on Google’s new Wave product dealt with a few issues I’ve seen (namely lag), this one will deal with an expansion on what I’ve realized over the past 3 days with regards to how Wave may be the future of the internet as introduced to me by a comment I received on my last blog:

More users: You can already read and write public waves (search for with:public). In fact, I’m pondering on how Google Wave will replace blogs when it will be more widespread.

I have to admit that when I first heard about Wave I was excited about how it would revolutionize not only the classroom but the ever growing online classroom. After receiving an invite though, I wasn’t sure how well it would fare or catch on with the non profession/student community. After reading this, did what was suggested to find public waves and after looking around I have to admit that I’m quite impressed with the possibilities. If you look at Google Wave from a viewpoint of primarily work, you won’t see how beneficial this could be to the internet community as a whole, but if you look at the system as a (internet) consumer, you have to be excited. Not only could Wave (with future gadgets and coding) very easily turn into a one stop shop for Forums, but also for chat rooms, website questions/comments forums, and more.