job search during the economy crunch

There are 2 ways of looking at this current scenario:
There is going to be no hiring at all
or
There will be new jobs created but at lower compensation to replace the more expensive employees laid off.

& the weird thing is this is the right time to get into a 2 year MBA or some other graduate program so that one can update his/her skills and hopefully when they graduate the economy would have stabilized.

I am stuck right in the middle of all this... there are firms that have frozen their hiring and there are some who have reduced their intake. This year is bad one for job hunting, BUT i see lot of my american friends getting multiple interviews. So that gives me hope even though those firms are not taking international students atleast there are still job positions to apply for.

the competition for those jobs will obviously be very high and I am preparing myself for that.

there is so much to balance now.. personal life, school work, job search. I will be taking some long breaks between bloggin til I get a job..

wish me luck ;)

2nd year in MBA

my god ever since school started ... my life has been going on a fast lane...

Financially i am tightly strapped.. so I am doing as much part time work as possible to continue to have some fun atleast while in school.

Couple of things happened that proved to be unnecessary expenses :

My good old Dell Inspiron died ..so I had to buy a new laptop. I chose Lenovo's IdeaPad for $615 ...and THENNNN when I received the new laptop ..guess what it was dead on arrival i.e. the laptop wouldnt even power up so I had to return it and wait for 3 more days to get the current laptop.

Meanwhile the gods up there weren't satisfied: My car was towed away while I was at my friends place for dinner.. I came out and my car was gone.. at first i thought it was stolen but then we called up the towing firm and they said they had it. I had to shell out $175 for getting my car back :(

& then 2 days later I also got a parking ticket for $20. (which seems small compared to the previous 2..but hey I am a student and 20 bucks matters)

The last straw was me getting a flat tire 2 days ago... that cost me $45 to change the tire and I still dont know how much i have to pay to get the flat tire fixed.

Someone is testing me..but I think I am handling it well thanks to friends.... in fact i was lucky that I was at my friends place and not in some highway when I noticed the flat tire.

Anywayz 2nd year classes are at full swing and we are supposed to focus on our job search as well. I am also having a great time with someone at school which helps me to get through these days much more happily..

and thats all folks... c ya next time.

busy busy busy ;)...

P.S. anyone with excess dollars... please do lend me some ..since the conversion rate for the dollar has jumped to 46 :( .. my indian loan is kinda not so useful right now....

Looking back

Yep this blog is about to complete 4 years. It started here in September 2004.
A part of my first blog post:
"Hmm for starters, here i am workin at infy having finished college just a year back.
what wud be really kool is , if i got to travel around.

okei i should continue later......... "

Ha ha wow I did sound a little naive back then huh :) I did satisfy my wish to travel around. I went to so many places here in the USA, then there was Paris and then of course Beijing and Shanghai.

Of course there are many many more places to see and I hope to be fortunate to see them too.

For some who have read my blog.. they will have seen posts on so many various subjects but I guess most of them are my reflections on certain things happening in my life. I would have complained bout love since I still dont understand how it works and also recently about marriages in general.

I have one more year of B school to go and I have been lucky to have my friends stick with me for this ride. The blog posting rate will decrease as school work increases.

Its interesting to see the various locations that people have accessed my blog.. people from India and Usa have been the most common.. recently I am seeing an interested reader from Taiwan.. thank you all for dropping in. I know I am not so entertaining .. all you get to read is a slice of my life ;) dont form an opinion about me just based on my blog .. I might be a far better human being on sight :p

Well I look forward to an eventful year...wish me luck.

things i might do if i stay single all my life

Some things that I might do if I stay single all my life.... of course this would disappoint a lot of people.

I am just letting my imagination run wild here.. i do hope I can do a few of these even if I am married.

Explore Australia, Africa and Latin America

Go to Hawaii and live like a beach bum for a month, just hopping across the islands and doing work that would pay just for that day.

Learn Sky diving & Surfing

Climb Mt.Everest

This is a working list and I shall update it when I think if anything else.. ;-)

its never easy saying goodbye

Last weekend was the Summer Commencement and a few of my dear one year MBA friends graduated. It is hard to realize that I wont be seeing their faces in Rawls hall anymore :(
I am so used to talking with a few of them and joking with them ..but now they have all gone to different parts of the USA and some will eventually return to their country too. I wish them all a great life and hope their dreams do come true.

I am already afraid of the end of my 2 year program because I am really not prepared to say goodbye to a special girl. But I know she is more comfortable returning home to Taiwan than staying alone in the USA, since she loves her family and misses them a lot. I want whats best for her..

Unfortunately the people that I have grown most comfortable with, are some of my friends from Taiwan. Thanks to them I have been able to appreciate chinese culture and of course authentic chinese food. I never knew that in chinese restaurants there is a seperate menu for the people who speak chinese and they have authentic chinese dishes in it....NOT the silly american chinese food like Kung Pao chicken etc ;) One of them even talks to me in chinese without even realizing that I dont understand a single word ...ha ha ha fun times that I should try and remember forever.

Any future chinese restaurant visit WILL NEVER be the same...I will certainly miss them. But I suppose I can say I have a home in Taiwan to go to ;)

Over the years we meet many people and make many friends. A few make an impact on you and a few just drift away as time and distance erodes the relationship.

I have a good group of friends from under grad..maybe one from high school ...& I am uncertain how many will remain from grad school after a few years go by .....

This is to all my friends out there ...THANK YOU. you have all been an essential part of my life even though I may not have been in touch with you I do remember you... when I look back at old photos your memories overpower my senses with all the experiences we have had together.

guilty

I am realizing that I am making my friends do things the way I like things to be done by making soft suggestions... sometimes I seem to be the puppet master. I am apparently trying to push/prod them in the direction where I want them to go.

I don't want to be like this. I stand guilty since I am a strong proponent of each person being his own master, he/she should be completely responsible for his actions but I see myself doing something that I would despise if I was at the receiving end :(

I shall try my best not to force my friends to do things that they wont like. As lavanya says "So Help me GOD"!!!

a little bit of courtesy please

Come on guys.. if you are dropping in on my blog..would it hurt you to leave a small comment.
Atleast I will know that someone read it and understood it ...it kinda reassures me that I am not spewing BS all over the web ;-)

well school starts in less than a month.. my goals :
Find a job
Find an assistantship
Help some of my friends find a job and
SPEND as much time as I can with my friends in school. I don't want to miss this last opportunity of being together with such a diverse set of people.

ciao.

queries to ponder on

Ever since my childhood I had been prodded into thinking bout the next step i.e. moving onto the next stage so that my life would be better.
-Like when in middle school people started asking me what I would do in high school and made me feel that if I did well in high school my life would be better.

- Then in high school the push was about under grad ..i.e. if I complete a good undergrad degree my life is supposed to be better

- In undergrad I am supposed to decide between higher studies or a job either of which would make improve my life

- Even at work the society was such that we had to think of doing another grad degree or settle down with a family.

- After the grad degree there is nudge towards getting married

- & then after marriage the next logical step according to Indian society is to have children (I do love children but dont u think the desire to start a family should not be due to societal pressure)

I dunno what is the next step after becoming a parent.. but if u still dont get my drift; here is the short version : people around us make us think that moving to the next stage is the best thing for us and somehow we follow this pre determined path and end up god knows where.

All these thoughts started after I went on a family picnic on the July 4th weekend. We were a bunch of south Indians going out and when we stopped at a rest area to start on a picnic lunch with solid south Indian food a thought suddenly struck me: Is this what I will end up doing too .. i.e. marry a wonderful Indian girl (thru the arranged marriage system), bring her to the USA and make friends with local Indian families and end up having Indian potlucks with the Indian community !!!

so the question is : IS THIS WHAT I WANT IN LIFE?

I guess u will notice that I complain about and question the whole arranged marriage system, this is because a lot of my peers have been getting married and I am feeling the pressure to move into the next stage in life. I am just plain scared of getting married thru an arranged marriage thats all ;-) I guess the girl wud also have similar thoughts ...& still arranged marriages work in India !! Isn't that amazing!!

What would happen if I fall in love with a foreign girl? How will my family react.. how will I take care of my parents if I had to settle down permanently in a foreign country? Will my parents be happy to live with me ? ...dangit I hate to think of such things...

job fairs & international students

The Business school does give us an opportunity to attend several job fairs and I guess out of all the ones I had attended for my internship, I got back 2 interview calls. This is probably 2 out of say 50 employers that I talked to in total (yes this may actually sound less).

But the biggest thing is u have to go and talk to each company rep with the same intensity and eagerness that it really drains me after talking to 4 firms.

In this one year I have been lucky to get a lot of good friends who are from Taiwan. I tried pushing them to attend the job fairs for the summer internships but most of them were not ready to face the pressure of talking with the company reps. It is sad that they are unable to overcome this mental block because they are each very unique individuals and I am certain they can survive in any job.

This next year there will be some major job fairs for full time offers and I will be attending them.. of course it is not guaranteed that I will get a job... but hell I am still trying. I am going to try again to push my Taiwanese friends to go to these job fairs but they must learn to be confident to converse easily with the reps.

I have noticed in school that the different groups kind of settle down into a comfort spot by hanging out with people from their own country.. I really question this kind of an approach.. because my reason to be studying in the US is to get an international exposure ..if I had wanted to stick to my Indian group I might as well have joined IIM Kozhikode (unfortunatey I cudnt get into the big 3). But u see these little groups spring up soon after school starts.. infact here they refer to these groups as mafias.. so there is a Korean mafia, an indian mafia and a chinese mafia.

AllI can say is if u reallllly want to work in the USA you will have to be comfortable talking to the american people ..talk bout sports talk bout the weather hell talk bout any damn thing ..just as long as u r able to strike a rapport with the guy who might be ur future interviewer ;)

Land of the Dragon

If there is one thing I don't mind spending money on that would be traveling!! I spent a whopping $3500 on my trip to China, this certainly made a dent on my financial statements..but hey u only live once right.

The photos from my Beijing trip are available here.

Ni Hao (means hello -- Nee How)

I spent 2 weeks in Beijing on the study abroad program at Tsinghua University and 4 days in Shanghai. I felt Beijing was a better place to visit than Shanghai. The first thing that surprised me was the amazing investment in infrastructure that the government has made. Due to the Olympics there was construction happening all over Beijing, they were building some fantastic sky-scrapers. I could see construction cranes all over the city.

The food is definitely a culinary delight.. if you know what you are ordering :) we had one mandarin speaking girl in our group of 50 and whenever she was with me I had the chance to try some great food. As long as you are open to eating anything (like me) you will have a great adventure with food.
Some of my friends had wild experiences in restaurants..they were actually making animal sounds to order chicken and beef ...ha ha ha even now I cant stop laughing when I think bout it. Some places I went I pointed at the pictures and I didnt have any problems with my food. I cant forget the cold chicken dish I had in one place..it had some spicy sauce on it which made my lips tingle whenever I blew over it... it felt quite good.

Well in terms of the places we saw..i guess we covered all the famous sites. Some of the must sees are obviously the Tianenmen square, Forbidden Kingdom, Beihai Park, the Great Wall (duhhhh), the Summer Palace, hutong area, San Li Tun area, wangfujing (the food street), the Silk Market & some of the buddhist temples.

The metro system was very well planned and the taxis were super affordable. We were out in the city till 2-3AM on some days and it was perfectly safe to take a taxi back to the hotel.

Since I was walking around with a few tall white Americans we were stopped by girls who wanted to take pictures with us... I am quite certain it was bcos of the American guys and not me ;) A lot of Chinese (i am guessing from out of town) took pictures of my group when we were walking around. It felt kinda weird !!! BUT this would happen only if we are in a group consisting of white people.

We had classes on 8 days till 4PM and then we hit the road to discover
as much of Beijing we possibly could. It was a special moment for me to see the Pandas in the Beijing Zoo. I had wanted to see a Panda at his own country.

& of course we were in Beijing when the earthquake hit the sichuan area, we didnt know that it had caused more than 80,000 deaths. May their souls rest in peace and I hope the remaining affected people are given a chance to restart their lives.

Next post bout my Shanghai trip.