The Morning Email

The morning coffee had no effect on Megha. Still feeling sleepy in her cubicle. In a corner, there stood a trophy which said 'Employee of the Year - Megha'. A couple of days ago, that one got added to her long list of achievements. Just two years in the race, she had set new performance benchmarks in the office. 2 promotions in two years!!

Today was different. She did not bring her car to office. Took the metro instead. She was so deep in her thoughts that she missed the announcement for her stop, went one station ahead and came back. Never had she been so lost. Ten days ago, she celebrated the second anniversary of her job. Her first job after graduate school. She remembered how scared she was while taking the interview and how relieved she was after getting a job offer.

Her chain of thoughts were interrupted by Aditi who came to her to ask some questions. Megha was now the 'To-Go' person in the office. Her quick success did not go well with her colleagues, but the junior folks in the company admired her short term accomplishments. Megha was not used to being in limelight. She did not have a good schooling record and her college performance did not paint a pretty picture to be noticed. This was new to her.

Megha was good at 'making sense out of numbers'. Infact, that was her job. She was paid to take unstructured and complex data and to derive meaningful conclusions from it. Last couple of months, she was getting the feeling that the only numbers which made her more happy where the numbers on her paycheck.

Two months back, she was thinking of moving to a more technical job. She wanted a new challenge. But this new challenge meant a lot of things. It meant giving up something you are really good at to go into an unknown territory. Giving up safety, the comfort zone. Giving up the success stint she had achieved in couple of years. Being in the race, she had the chance to create history. One more quick promotion and she would be the youngest manager of her company.

The longer she stayed here, more difficult it would have been for her to try something different. The last time she spoke to her friends about having thoughts of shifting to a new job, they had a good laugh. Some of them were struggling to be efficient at their current job and feared that someday they would be thrown out. Megha throwing away a secure job to go through the insecurity of finding a new job in a different field was beyond their imagination.

She looked at the 'Star performer award', opened her mailbox, replied to the unread email items which needed a response. Opened up another email window and wrote 'Thank you very much for everything, it's been a great journey, looking forward to a new one, consider this my two weeks notice'.

Sometimes, logic defies sense! Giving up the job two days after being declared the performer of the year.

Some decisions are best made by the heart and not the brain.  

The Job Hunt

If you didn’t believe in a thing called luck, come to US and hunt for a part-time on-campus job. How long does it take to find one? Well, there is no definite answer to that. The first door you knock could present you with a job. On the other hand, you could roam around the campus for the entire semester and yet be without one!

Your qualifications and resume do not matter much in this hunt. At some help-desk jobs, the qualifications on your resume work against you. They need people with little technical background who would never leave for another better job. All Said, the process is exciting and the stories I’ve heard last month or so are super-thrilling.

My job hunt story has many twists and turns. Two days after landing in US, I had the opportunity of an interview in a Classic Japanese restaurant. That person even offered me a job with an astronomical sum of money which could have paid for half of my MS studies. For a moment, I was tempted. Tempted to work for an illegal job; tempted for the money; tempted to put work ahead of my studies. After eating the only 2 vegetarian items on the menu, I ended up rejecting the job.

In the next few days, some lucky people got jobs. If you get a job very early in job hunt, you should either be super lucky or super desperate for a job. You are travelling in a bus and start a conversation with the person next to you and he ends up giving you a job opportunity, this is how lucky can you get. There are some others who have roamed all the buildings in the campus all month long without getting one! Wait a second, you can be luckier that this too! The person who arranges your temporary accommodation could refer you for a job that would save you half your tuition fees. In some odd cases, the seniors you stay with would treat you as alien and not even let you use the kitchen utensils. Luck as they call it. Then there are some dumb people. One guy forgot his bag in some department. After an hour or so, he realized that. On the way back, someone asked him are you looking for a Graduate Assistantship (GA). That idiot said; no I’m looking for a bag.

One fine day, one of my friends calls me up and says there is a GA position which requires VB experience, you should apply. I didn’t know VB, yet there was no harm in giving a try. I walked all across the campus to reach the building where the job was to submit my resume. Fun part, the lady who read my resume tells me there is no VB on this resume. I don’t know what to say. I walk in for a VB job without VB on my resume! I end up telling her that I’ve done things more important than VB and there’s no space to fit in VB experience. I still can’t believe how she took that reply. Ten minutes later, two of my friends walk in the same fashion, say the same thing and that lady drove them away!

A simple estimate of the replies to the job positions, if you apply to 200 job positions, you end up getting reply from about 10 of them. 5 of those say sorry, we don’t have a job, 3 of them say we don’t have a job currently, 1 says we are considering your case and 1 actually calls you for an interview. My bad luck was so bad that I got an Interview for the VB job out of all that I applied. I read an email at 11 in the night saying that you have an interview at 11 next morning, we will ask questions about Visual Basic and databases.

This was a nothing to lose opportunity. If I didn’t get the job, I would end up learning VB and adding something to my resume. I slogged all night, reading some stupid internet forum about VB and went for the interview where I realized that I was fielded against 3 other computer science people on their ‘Home turf’. Despite that, I feel that I did well. I can say that because I got an email saying that I got a half-time GA position and that implied that 25% of my tuition fees are waived of and I end up having 1000 dollars a month. This joy however was short lasting and in the next 15 minutes, I got another email saying we currently are filling only one position, so we cannot offer you the job. In 15 minutes, I was dreaming about the things to do with 1000 dollars and now walking on the ‘Boulevard of broken dreams’.

In the meanwhile, one of us came to know about a sure shot job opportunity. 2 people wanted that job. To decide who gets it, we held an event called as 'The Coin-toss'. A job was at stake and 10 people were watching as someone was about to get lucky on the flip of the coin. Eventually, it turned out that some other guy went on to get the job.

An email was circulated in most university departments regarding a c# job opportunity. I had funnily replied to that email saying that I have a 3 year work experience in C# and many projects when I had none. I got an email from them saying to give them a 10 minutes ppt about the projects and work I handled in C#. It is funny, but I made up a 10 minutes ppt adding all the crap projects that I had done and stating that I had used C# for it. I decorated some slides with the photos of databases from my BE project, a piece of shit which I hoped would never help anyone ever!


The presentation was nice according to me and I went quite close to getting that job too which eventually went to a Chinese cs guy. In the next few days, I came close to getting a job in crazy departments far different than the thing that I am here to study for. I came really really close to getting a job at Agricultural Department, A photographer’s job, A job at the Food and Nutrition Department, A job of straightening wires at Mechanical department. The people in the US raise your hopes a lot. You cannot be sure of a job until you see your name on the pay roll, no matter how close you think you are. In one case, someone was told to come the next day to discuss salary issues and when she went in the next day, she was informed that the position is already filled.

All said, I finally have a job in Civil Engineering department. It doesn’t pay much, but I’m happy that I like what I’m doing. I wish good luck to others who are still finding on-campus jobs in US.

From the Observation desk...

This post is about various people I’ve met in last 10 days in US. I like to observe people and how they go about the doing thing.

The one thing I liked the most about people working in US is that they have a smile on their face, have a cheerful attitude even if they actually don’t like the job that they do. They are eager to help you. A simple thing like opening a bank account, which is a boring task in India given the amount of paperwork is such a fun task here. They treat the customer as a friend and talk very freely.

Now, a little bit about the Indians I met here. I came to this place with a bit of prejudice about my peers and seniors whom I would meet. But things are not the same as I pictured them to be. Our seniors are extremely helpful. I expected there to be some ragging, but there wasn’t any. Infact, all of us freshers had someone to pick up at the airport.

I live temporarily with 4 Bengali phd students who prepared food for me for the first day and brought food packets for me for that would last 10 days till I find a permanent apartment. Bengali food tastes great I tell you! The Indian student bodies working here are doing a great job. They are full of enthusiastic students, there is no senior junior divide, and all of us sat together in a conference room and sketched a plan for the Indian Independence day program in the university. We played cricket and football and hopefully play that ever weekend.

Now, about the batch mates, there is a lot of variety over here. Many of them are quite diplomatic. I think that’s because most of the students who have come here carry a form of burden which will ease as time progresses. ‘When I get a safe and secure job in the university I’ll give you the information about all the other jobs available in the campus’ is the indirect message everyone around is carrying. Safety first is on everyone’s mind. There is a bit of professional touch to friendship, you help me and I help you. Give and take. I’m sure if I’d met these people in Engineering Degree College, they might have made great friends.

One thing I like about blogger more than facebook or twitter is that not many people read it! So, you can be more frank about the things you write rather than writing the edited version or the polished one.

I hope all of us here get good jobs, at least the hourly ones and things around change for the better. One more thing, a long lost friend called yesterday. I don’t know where he got my number from, but the conversation went something like this….

A: Hey Sanket, wassup, how’s life, Aaj teri bahut yaad aa rahi thi.

Me: Oh Sahi hai, good you remembered after such a long while. How’s life.

A: Life’s great, acha sun, Can you help me with one thing, actually…….

Now I know why he remembered!!