Career Thoughts

In honor of Mother’s Day, I would like to share one of my favorite stories of my mom. My mom had recently migrated to the United States and was looking for a job. She wanted to work at Dunkin’ Donuts. She called about her application and was told, “We do not currently have an available opening. Please try calling at another time.” My mom took this literally and called for 30 consecutive days. After much grief, the donut shop reluctantly hired her to stop the phone calls. She ended up loving the job and worked there for several years.

Nowadays, the job-hunting atmosphere has changed a bit. Most applications are completed online, and calling is unusual except in the case of an interview. Certain strategies remain the same though. Persistence is necessary in finding a job. Applying for software engineering roles introduces another layer of completing coding challenges before the interview takes place. I remember taking one coding test and I had no clue how to solve any of the questions. There are tradeoffs to consider in this situation. I could either struggle to solve them or close the test and put in a few more applications for additional roles.  I was mentally exhausted.

One thing that kept me motivated was the OSU Post-Bacc in CS student-created slack community. There is a channel called #rejections. Members would post names of companies they were recently rejected from. It made me feel like I was not alone seeing that I would receive rejections from many of the same companies they did. A rejection competition was launched where the goal was to collect as many email rejections as possible. Due to this, I took more initiative in applying and got more interviews than I expected. I am happy to say I have received an anti-rejection so I no longer participate in the competition currently but someday I will be joining again.

Capstone Update

I cannot believe my team is at the midway point already. This quarter does pass by fast. Our project is fully linked to the database with all base features implemented. At this point, we are going to work on adding additional features and improving existing functionality.  I am sharing a screenshot of one of the pages I have contributed to. I have learned more about React as my previous React experience was limited. A bug that plagued me for a while was deleting components from a list. When I selected delete, it would delete the wrong component from the list. I now know that React requires a unique ID, not related to list index, to properly identify the component to be deleted.

Personal Update

I was convinced for many years that I was incapable of rolling my R’s. I took Spanish in High School and never managed to do it at that time. There are many strategies online and I watched countless YouTube videos. The key thing is it is less about tongue movement than expected. I do need to practice more as I need to actively think about it before saying the word, but this is a major milestone for me.