The second day of the career fair at Georgia Tech brought heavy hitters like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, IBM, and Siemens. I dressed a little more nicely and devoted more time to make sure I would have a chance to talk with each of the companies. Some of my visits proved to be more helpful than others. I was rather turned off that Siemens seemed interested only in hiring interns rather than full-time employees; IBM supplied few technical representatives so I didn’t gain any truly useful information there, either. The representatives from Microsoft, Intel, and AMD were all reasonably helpful. I got my resume out to each company, but I’m still not sure exactly what the point of the career fair is. I have pondered putting off the job hunt until after I graduate. The lease on the apartment runs through March so I will probably be in town anyway.
Georgia Tech held the first half of its annual or semi-annual—I’m not sure which—career fair today. I dressed business casual because it seemed appropriate; most of the job-seekers at the fair were dressed in full business attire. I mainly targeted large, reputable companies with a definite need for software engineers. I talked to representatives from HP, Amazon.com, Micron, and MathWorks. Buses reserved for the fair shuttled students back and forth so it wasn’t too difficult to get there.
I paid my second visit to Georgia Tech’s Career Services department to seek guidance on building my résumé in preparation for my upcoming job hunt. I met with recruiting manager Cindy Jordan and we went over a recent revision of my resume together. The most significant ideas to come out of the session were that I needed to restate my objective and expand on my work experience. The rest was along the lines of “format this” and “fix that.” The session was helpful, nonetheless.
Tuesday brings new classes and new challenges:
- CS 4001
- There’s one unfortunate girl and a bunch of geeky guys talking mostly about privacy and IP concerns. Looks like lots of group-based assignments.
- JAPN 1002
- Well, Suzuki-sensei is young and semi-cute, but I thought Matsushima-sensei was cuter. I’m still kind of lost, though things started coming back when we started doing introductions.
- ECE 4006
- The professor (Schlag) seems to have no aesthetic sense at all. His PowerPoint slides were nothing but black Times text and carriage returns on a white background. I do at least have a vague idea of what I want to do for a project.
acpstudios.net has finally been transferred to Go Daddy as of late this evening. I played with the site colors some more, but I’m still not entirely sure what I’m looking for.
This was the first day of classes for the Fall 2004 semester at Georgia Tech. This will be my ninth semester as a student here, and I am planning to graduate at the end of the semester in December.
I’ve tried to compile some of my initial impressions of my classes here:
- HTS 2061
- “Traditional Asia” seems like it could prove to be quite interesting as the focus is (not surprisingly) on China and Japan. There is a take-home final for this class. Fellow Japanese student Brooks-san is in this class as well.
- INTA 2210
- I went to the wrong classroom and ended up with HPS 1040 deja vu. Location corrected, the professor (Keene) is definitely British or some derivative. The entire grade seems to be based on a set of four essays of a rather short length. When I inquired about this, Prof. Keene said that he was trying to get students to focus on the most important things. Sounds good to me.
- ME 3322
- Another fellow Japanese student, Ronald, is in this class. The professor (Smith) mentioned something about group problem-solving that sounded unusual.
- JAPN 1002
- I’m rusty; what can I say? I was disappointed to see that the class is indeed being taught by a completely different set of professors. I’m told that one of the professors is very cute, though.
I made a late-night run to the Austell target to pick up a few more things for the apartment. It’s still a long way out there; I don’t know why I thought it might be any shorter. I was surprised that we actually seem to have a quicker route to the East-West Publix, where I used to do pretty much all my grocery shopping.
I also found a neat toy called AveDesk. It’s a small freeware app that will run ObjectDock docklets as stand-alone “desklets.” The end result is something much like Konfabulator for the Mac or the new Dashboard feature coming in the next release of OS X.
I also watched “Bakuretsu Tenshi” and updated a bunch of Debian packages on Freya.
