October-2

October was one of the most fruitful months along my job-hunting trail. When the democrats and republicans are working their ways to the white house, I was working mine to a paycheck.

Before I went to shell's on-site, I did a campus interview with Xerox, the photo-copy machine maker. My optics background hooked me up with this. It went well, but ended up empty-handed as well.

I also got a campus-interview with praxair, a company making industrial gases. To impress the interviewer, Dr. Loyld Brown, I arrived at his info session almost half an hour earlier than it started, in a rainy evening. I also found out his was a student of Prof. Zukowski, doing colloidal science for his phd thesis. These efforts paid off. I got invited to their on-site interview two weeks afterwards. It's scheduled to be in the second week in November.

I also went to chicago to interview with a trading company, the Infinium Capital Management, for the financial engineer position, on Oct 26th. The story was funny. I arrived early, and went to do some reading in the stairs, and found myself locked in the stairway. I panic, called the HR, left her a message, and luckily finally got out without calling 911. The rest of the interview was more like get-to-know-about you. I basically chatted with these guys, telling them my favorite sports, books, authors and, oh yeah, why I am interested in finance. It's tricky question, because you can't tell them it's got good money. On my way driving home, I joked with myself, it must be their loss if they decide to invite me to their round.

It's a funny world. Like how unexpected and unpredictable the stock market is, Infinium sent me their final interview invitation. That marks the end of the october.

You might wonder, hey man, what's up with your research. Is your advisor on sabbatical or something? Folks, you reminded that I am still a graduate student who is expected to do research for a skinny living. My research basically halted after June, when my parents visited me. My nature paper about surface contraction was rejected in June. I submitted it to nature materials after some
minor refinements in July. In august, I got the review back, and the referees asked for some clarifications without rejecting the paper. Some of the issues raised by the referees are tough to answer. Then came my job-hunting season. Meanwhile, my diffractive imaging paper was submitted to science in September. Unfortunately, and according to my advisor, surprisingly, it was rejected in October by the editor, without being sent out for external reviewing. We were upset. But I put that aside as well. The surface melting experiment that I proposed as my summer research plan, was essentially not happening. I have to say thank you to Jim, my generous advisor, who put up with me and paid me for doing nothing in these months. He deserves the title, EMPLOYER OF THE YEAR.