October-1

It's always difficult to make a long story short. I am doing my best, fella.

I've got a call from the Dow Chemical company on my way back from the california trip. They invited me to their info session on a monday night. I did not know until I got to the session that I was not guaranteed an interview spot. But the day after that night, they called me and assigned me a spot the wednesday morning. As always, I choose 8:00 am . I always believe in the first-comer advantage.

In the interview with Dow, I talked to Ali Shah, who's an pakistani grew up in hong kong. We had a nice conversion, and of course I won't hesitate to mention my cantonese-speaking background and hong-kong related cultural upbringing. Just in case he's interested.

I started to realize that preparing for an interview seriously is no less than for a final exam. I got serious for the SRD, after Xiaoyu, a postdoc from john roger's group, told me that she was rejected after attending the SRD. My expectation plummeted, and my full-carbon-bike dream blurred. Nothing can stop me from my bike, I told myself. I found myself googling anything about shell, reading their financial and technical reports, taking notes, wiki-ing about catalysts, marketing myself as a catalyst expert in my presentation, making up sharp questions to ask, and even reading all the articles about the oil industry from the economist.com (it's a great website, I have to recommend). I went to such a great length and almost became a quasi-expert in the energy business. All these efforts, I found later, had widen my eyes and deepen my knowledge to the business world.

The SRD finally came. It's my first on-site. Yes, I am newbie. It's got two days: the first day I presented my research to a technical group at the Westhollow Technology Center in the suburb of houston. To my surprise, and theirs, the technical group is no catalyst group. It's a materials science group, or metallurgy group. That means, all my marketing strategies emphasizing catalyst-research were wrong. I told myself not to worry, they will pay attention to my transferrable skills.

My second SRD day was an the one that I had spent the most time preparing for. It had three parts: personal interview, case study and group fight. In case study I am a regional manager trying to tackle problems for a oil company in a small country facing a lot of issues. In the group fight, I teamed up with an indian girl, Lowri, to fight for the Shell social fund to improve our community.
I guessed I did not do too bad. When I finished everything and found myself in the bed at my girlfriend's place, I received Shell's email: "we are looking for position for you". That means, I was not offered a job immediately, but they were trying to hook me up with something. "It's good enough", I told myself, putting a question mark to my full-carbon bike dream.