ooh, first blood!

Ooh, tonight marks the first of a special occasion... my first rejection of this year's recruiting season!

Yes, y'all might think I'm utterly nuts to use an exclamation point to say that I've been rejected from a company, but to be honest I'm grateful I got an interview at this company at all. I was the only non finance major interviewing for a finance position at this very prestigious company, and I personally think I did myself proud thinking on my feet at this interview. This rejection has just spurred my determination to give it my all for these next two months. I'm exciting for the types of people I'll met, the offices I'll be seeing, and the places I'll be travelling to. And no, this isn't sleep deprivation talking. =D

This is an entry about jobs primarily because tomorrow's the Commerce Career Day. Was it a year ago that I was blogging about attending CCD as a third year? As I put off doing prep work for tomorrow... here's what usually occurs at a career fair.

So the world of internships and jobs may seem like a hazy unknown to most people, especially considering most of you are trying to decide what college to attend. When you arrive on Grounds though, you immediately think of, "alright, I'm here. What's next?" The big bad scary real world, or graduate school for the lucky few. One thing that you'll need to learn how to do (and something that I feel our comm school does a great job of) is learn how to work a career fair and network with professionals.

What are the most important things you need to have when talking to employers? A 30 second elevator speech and some darned good questions.

A 30 second elevator speech is a quick, introductory speech that catches people's attentions. What if you met the single most influential person in your life in the elevator. What would you say? How would you act? Do you smile and try to crack a joke? Or do you act somber and mature? As I've mentioned a few times in other posts, your self introduction should really reflect your personality. If you're normally a funny person, definitely go for humor. Just try not to be what you're not. It's painfully obvious and makes for stilted, awkward conversations. You definitely don't want to be remembered for that.

As for questions, it's really a way to differentiate yourself from other people. Think about it, employers (and admissions officers), meet hundreds, if not thousands of people, over the course of a recruiting season. You want them to remember you and pull for you when your resume (or application) comes up in the pool. You could try to stick out through that killer joke, or that scintillating conversation on the future of the Euro. I like to think of unusual questions. Most people tend to ask the same or vague questions. You definitely make a big impression if your questions are atypical (in a good way!).

Seniors are probably hardcore doing applications right now, good luck! Drop me a comment if you have a question.

dancin' the night away...

Well, not quite. I just came back from the Taiwanese Students' Association dance practice for Culturefest.

Culturefest is the annual performance that all the cultural organizations put on during UVA's Parent's Weekend. Orgs usually sing a song in their native tongue, do a popular dance back home, or put on some type of martial arts display.

As you could tell from my opening line, I'm Taiwanese. I actually grew up in Taiwan for 15 years after spending the beginning of my life in NOVA. So.. it's quite complisticated where I'm from. For our performance at this year's Culturefest, we're doing a dance that I'm just... slightly ashamed to be doing. It's a very Taiwanese style of dancing... which is to say there's lots of random pontificating and hilarious movements. For those of you who are interested.. le sigh. Don't laugh too hard please.

TSA's girls dance for 2009.

DONE with the scary accounting project!

...that has consumed my life for the last two weeks. I've finally just wrapped up working around 15 hours for my "Accounting Information Systems" class. Woot. I'm so bleary right now.

Apparently AIS is the "scary" class in the accounting concentration. There's definitely been a lot of homework (which I think has helped weed out a lot of people), but I would honestly say that there's a lot of value in all the homework. As an accountant, or auditor, you really need to know how your systems work, where there's potential for fraud or where controls might fail. Yeah, I probably sound like your typical book devouring nerd right now. =P

School's been in session for roughly three weeks now, and I've gotten a much better handle on my classes. For those of you who enter the comm school, I highly recommend "Negotiations" with Professor Bass. He's an excellent professor with lots of experience, and we've been learning in the best way through doing actual negotiations. I'm slightly sad though, yesterday was the first time in which I didn't have a successful negotiation. I was an employer, and my partner was a student I'd just extended an offer to. We didn't come to an agreement because she wanted a much higher salary than I was willing to offer, and I realized through the course of our negotiations that she seemed to be in it for the short term, while I was looking to build a long term team. This incompatibility in goals really spurred my decision to not keep pursuing this deal. Hopefully the professor sees it that way too tomorrow, *shrug.

I also recommend Professor Porter's "Federal Taxation I" class. While it might seem like the boringest subject on earth and that you'd rather gouge your own eyeballs out before learning about tax, the professor actually makes it a really interesting subject. Her lecture outlines explain difficult concepts very clearly, and her method of teaching somehow manages to capture the class' interest.

I also had my first interview on, incidentally, the first day that interviews started. Kicking off this recruitment season was probably the hardest interview I had in my life. A lot of it had to do with my atypical background, and I definitely got drilled on some technical questions (and this was the interviewer being nice to me!). However, I have to say that it's been my most enjoyable one thus far, precisely because it was so challenging. I appreciated the questions and hope I rose to the occasion.

Morale of that story is, don't be in a hurry to pigeon hole yourself into a future career path when you come into college. My resume was probably one of the last things the interviewer expected to see, and yet I still received an interview offer. Things change, your interests change, and you end up finding out that your personality is actually better suited elsewhere. The world is your oyster, embrace it. =)

looking for a successor!

Alright, I've decided that it's time to hand over the bat and give this position to someone else. This is the blurb that will hopefully be circulating newsletters sometime soon. If any of you guys reading this (all 100+ a day! Someone comment!) have a friend who you think would be great for this, please point them my way!

LOVE UVA? Love to BLOG?

Try out to be the next UVA student blogger!
Blog whatever you like, completely uncut and uncensored.
Give prospective students a view of good ole TJ's University!

Send two entries to melli@virginia.edu by Oct. 5th.
Blog located @ uvalife.blogspot.com


And yes, I will do some reveal type thing at the end since my CC account keeps getting peppered with messages.

another disastrous football game?

Alright, so at this point in time I don't even really want to comment on our football team anymore. Hey, they try and the student body definitely appreciates that. There are some few choice words about certain key people in the football program that I heard at last Saturday's game that I don't want to repeat however...

So let's focus on our other awesome teams, such as men's tennis, women's swim, and men's basketball (to name the ones I read about the Cav Daily today). As usual, I'm always in awe of student athletes. I can't imagine having to get up to work out at 6 am, go to class, go to afternoon practice, probably some evening workouts, and then finally getting to do work. There was actually a guy on the football team in my comm block last semester, and the poor guy was travelling when our group projects were due. I think his team worked out something like meeting for two days straight, working on it just a little bit when he was gone, and staying up all night the night before the presentation to go over any final changes.

For this time's football game though, I can cross something off the 100+ list of things to do before you graduate list -- I tailgated on the Lawn! It was a club tailgate since one of the co-chairs is a Lawnie. The way a Lawn tailgate works is that there's usually music playing from the room, a folding table set up outside with food and drinks, and games going on in the Lawn. I ate lots of wings, played some frisbee, and wished that my club had a crochet set like some other rooms were playing. Tailgating on the Lawn is quite an experience, I wish I'd had the chance to do it before. And, to cap off this day's entry -- here's a picture of our marching band at the beginning of the game.