Hi Fella

Dear Non-existent Readers:

I haven't shown up since Sept. 2007, till now for no good reasons. It's a busy
and stressful semester, mainly because I was in the bloody mud of job-hunting.
The philosophy of blogging or logging is to document our life. So, here we go,
let me briefly tell what I have been through in the past few months.

Sept:
After my parents went back to china, I started to hunt for a job. No big
deal, isn't it. Hold on! Let me give you a little bit of my info. I am an international (to be specific, chinese) male, PhD student in materials science, doing TEM for a living with no work experience. When you plug this information, it basically screens out 99% of the available jobs. Monster.com does no good for me.

So I spent two weeks to attend some seminars on how to prepare a resume and a cover letter, and then found myself in the September engineering career fair in the U of Illinois. I was like a fish in the ocean. I wore my contact lens. I put on my girl-friend's-gift suit. And I talked to recruiters like a you-never-piss-me-off salesman. Like no child left behind, I got my first campus interview with a flash memory maker in Cal, the Spansion. Suzette, was the lady that interviewed me. Officially, that was my first
job interview in US, which lasted about 40 mins. I was told that I was exactly what they wanted. To be honest, I was flattered to hell. But that's all I got from them. No follow-up afterwards.

I was lucky to find the afternoon tea-party of the Shell oil company in the digital computer lab building in the afternoon before their interview day. Of course I brought my weapon with me, I mean my resume. After couple pretentious greetings and chattings, I went straight to the core: "Can I get an interview?" Pinggui, a good friend of mine, reminds me that you've got to be bold. Employers honor that. "That's a good question", said the HR lady. I left the tea-party empty-handed. But at 6:00 pm, they called me: " Jason, are you available for an interview tomorrow at 11:00 am". "Are you kidding me? I mean, yes", said me.

Dave Hamilton interviewed me on the campus, on behalfed of the Shell oil. We started by introducing myself, talking about my research. I was smart enough to not going too deep and making it just not too shallow for him. I assumed he's got a technical background. Then the fun part came. I was asked to choose among four topics to discuss: global standarization, alternative energy, blah and blah. I chose thealternative energy, figuring that my geeky soul might help. I talked about the pros and cons, the plan, the detail. Dave seems to be pretty happy about my answers. When my turn to question came, I sort-of did an answer-check:"so does shell has any plan in alternative energy and what is its criteria to choose the location". Dave and I extended the interview by 30 mins to answer my question happily. We even touched the politics of china and russia, and learned why capitalists concerned about the local politics of where they are investing.

I walked out of the interview room, still empty-handed, but full of satisfaction. One week later, I received an email that they are inviting me to houston, texa to attend the on-site interview, the Shell Recruitment Day (SRD). At that moment I was thrilled. I remembered Iwas doing TEM experiment when I got the email. My first reaction was, everyone who got invited to an on-site ends up getting the job. I was so sure that I started picturing myself riding a full carbon bike on the houston beach.

The rest of the September was filled with hype, hope, uncertainty, and a microscopy conference in the sonoma wine country in California.In the conference I met Bin, my good friend who's working for FEI co. now, and told him about my coming interview with Shell. I also forgoed a wine-country trip to conduct a phone interview with Dupont in the hotel. My dear girl friend joined me after the meeting, and we spent a wonderful weekend in the monterey penusilar south of san fransisco. It is a heaven-like location. It's got the pacific ocean every corner, and we did jog around the 17-miles pebble beach, have breakfast in the morning, visited the aquarium, and breathe the hell out of the fresh atmosphere over here. I promised to myself I got live by some water.