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Finding what makes you ‘exceptional’ key to success
It’s actually been more than a month since I wrote this column, which follows rather directly from my previous two. My deliberations on the wonderful matter of how the financial crisis is impacting the job hunt, and the need to find the right fit, led me to what is perhaps the logical next step: When you find a job you think you want, how do you stand out in order to get it? Maybe just being a good fit isn’t enough.
My thesis is that what makes a person exceptional is, to quote the column, to be “at least a little bit above average in an interesting combination of ways.” It doesn’t necessarily matter what that combination is, as long as you can find the way to make use of it in a way that gives you a leg up.
The difficult part is, of course, that it isn’t always obvious how you can usefully combine, say, chemistry and economics. Many people go through life without discovering what that is. Sadly, it seems that like with many of the other things I’ve written about this semester, I have thoughts and not answers. I wonder if that makes me a bad columnist?
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Financial turmoil creates greater risks in job hunting
With the financial downturn getting progressively worse, the job hunting picture for students has grown murkier. In my own case, I’ve seen the companies I’ve applied for make major changes, whether that is laying off thousands of workers or even getting bought out.
All told, it’s really making me wonder whether I should make the effort to work toward getting hired by some of these companies. It seems at this point that most of the financial services companies, along with banks, are going through such a rough period that any hiring they actually do is not guaranteed at all.
In the end, this is the business world, and there are no guarantees in business. Rather, it is a matter of working just a bit harder and researching companies just a bit more, in order to ensure the position a new college hire gets isn’t swept out from under them in a matter of weeks or months.
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Strive for best fit, not “best job”
The career fair is upon us today, and with over 400 companies represented between the two days it’s very difficult to decide which companies to even speak with, let alone which you want to work for. If we as students are overwhelmed by the number of options, however, I can only imagine how the company representatives feel as they get bombarded with questions, resumes, and puppy dog eyes from hundreds of students pleading for a job or at least an interview.
The solution for both parties seems simple, and it’s the subject of my column: No matter how outstanding you are, the rest of the applicant pool is just as smart and just as talented. Likewise, from the corporate perspective, the top students you want to hire all have countless options before them. The emphasis cannot just be on how wonderful an applicant is, or how prestigious the position is. Rather, the question has to move to one of fit: Is this the company that is most in line with my goals? Is it the one to which my background holds the most appeal?
In the real world, however, these sorts of questions are notoriously hard to evaluate. You often don’t get a feel for the culture of a company until after you’ve worked for them for a while, and companies are well aware that the interview process doesn’t tell them nearly everything they would like to know. The solution to that remains elusive. Whoever finds it will, I think, make the world of job-hunting a much better place. And probably make a boatload of money in the process.
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Tradeoffs between time, money shaped by tradition
After a brief hiatus, I am back to writing my regular columns for the Technique. This one might be called the last column of my “Kazakhstan series,” though I never thought of my columns like that.
While I feel like I ramble a bit, the thought process isn’t so complicated. People have to make a tradeoff between money and convenience, and that’s the quintessential question of product development. When you read advice for product development, one of the key points is always that your product should be a painkiller, not a vitamin: In other words, your product needs to solve an actual problem the target audience has, not just make things marginally better. If it isn’t, you’ve basically created a luxury item. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, but it completely changes your target audience and approach.
More critically, I think that when it comes to the issue of software development, creating “luxury items” doesn’t work. I mean, sure, you could consider something like Adobe Photoshop a luxury item because you can get The Gimp for free, but Photoshop is the industry standard software that professionals rely on to do their work. It solves the pain these people have of photo and image editing more effectively than anything else.
In web applications, the situation is even more stark. There are a select few applications that actually cost money to use (and don’t have a free version), and with a few exceptions these are targeted at businesses. If your target is the casual user–the one who might carry two cell phones because it works out to be cheaper–your product just may not be worth paying for.
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My chameleon hand
One of my more unusual assignments at work: serve as the model for an experiment with hand drawings. This was the result after some Photoshop processing.
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Absence of failure may be the key to real happiness
After this long blogging break, I realized that I forgot to post a link to my most recent column from the Technique. As is often the case, articles I stumbled across on the web made me begin thinking about a topic — in this case, that of happiness and why people are or are not happy in certain situations.
My key point is that students at Tech are often unhappy because they have unreasonable expectations of success, which cannot hold up in the Institute’s challenging environment. I’m not sure I made the argument as well as I wanted to, though, and I’m frustrated because I don’t have any really practical ideas for making students happier. As is often the case with matters of the mind, it’s up to the students themselves to adopt the right attitude.
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Conferences and commitment
Locks hang on the "Bridge of Love" in Kiev.
In Kiev, there is a roughly 100-year-old bridge known as the “Bridge of Love.” It is not a particularly long or wide bridge, as it only connects two parks and is intended for pedestrian traffic only, and in fact it seems a little unstable. But as the bridge is one of many structures worldwide to carry the legend that passing across it with a significant other will lead to eternal happiness, couples have scribbled, tied cloths, and placed metal locks onto the bridge as signs of their commitment.Despite the fact that I just had an unforgettable experience learning from and working with people from over 20 different countries at AIESEC’s International Trainers Congress and I have lots of memorable photos from the trip, this is the photo that stands out most in my mind.
The locks on the bridge are to me a reminder of the commitments I made to myself and to others at the conference: to aim for and achieve my goals related to gaining and practicing training skills, keeping up contact with people from the conference and applying my newfound knowledge in a meaningful way. Shamefully, I have often failed to complete the lofty goals I set for myself at these conferences, but I think there are several things that differentiate ITC from the past ones.
First and foremost, the goals I set coming off the other conferences were largely AIESEC-related, and my occasional love-hate relationship with the organization (or at least AIESEC United States) often got in the way and sapped me of energy. The skills I gained at ITC, on the other hand, are much more applicable to my overall life, and practicing them makes sound sense regardless of the medium. In the near term that’s likely to continue to be AIESEC, but in the future it could be anything. Second, I was too busy much of the time to really reflect on the things I wanted to achieve and put the appropriate amount of effort into them, as I was constantly sideswiped by “just getting by.” As I mentioned in my thoughts on mental bandwidth, I think this problem is, at least for the immediate future, solved. Finally, I am a somewhat older and more experienced person now, and I think that will also play a role.
So with all that said (and no actual details about the conference itself — I’ll correct that oversight another time), I’m looking for suggestions on as many effective ways to hold myself accountable as I can reasonably implement. What are your thoughts, oh few readers of mine?
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MIA
For any of you trying to get in touch with me, I’m going to be pretty much entirely unavailable for the remainder of my time in Kiev. If you send me an email, don’t expect an answer before May 14.
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A clarification
Apparently that whole thing about ironing shoelaces was an elaborate joke. :-/
Now I must go search the office; I’ve been informed that gullible is written on the ceiling, but I absolutely can’t seem to find where…
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Online social media sends multiple messages
So I forgot that this was the last issue of the newspaper and, rather than writing a column I had intended to for quite some time following up on things the Technique called Tech students, administrators, etc. out on over the year, I wrote something about how I wanted to be spiteful and annoy people by replying to a Facebook message via Twitter. C’est la vie.
I do think it is an interesting point, however: What are we revealing about our attitudes in the choices we make to communicate information? Being on the other side of the world from many of the people I would regularly communicate with has been fertile ground for contemplating this…
In Brief
My name is Arcadiy, and arcadiy.org is my website. Funny how that works.
I write about life, technology, my random side projects and whatever else strikes my fancy. I make no promises about the utility or entertainment of anything here. However, I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mention.
In my day job I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft.
You can read (or look at) more by me in my momentstream.
- I love it when people pay $20 for moderately-useful apps that are free on non-Mac platforms and are excited because they didn't pay $300. #
- @shrutishah there is no way to make a nicer URL to your SkyDrive today. We're aware this is a common request, though! #
- Either my English competence dropped while I was in Moldova or the latest version of Office 2010 has become way more of a grammar nazi. #