Building the PC

I recently wrote about ordering the parts for my new PC. I received all the hardware and put it together yesterday afternoon. Haven’t flipped the switch yet because I’m going to pick up an OEM copy of Vista from my friend for far less money than I would have had to shell out if I’d bought it retail, and that’s worth waiting an extra day.

Some thoughts:

The Thermaltake M9 1000 w/ side window is not only a nice case in terms of looks and sturdiness, but it makes for an easy build. First, the tool-less installation of 5.25″ devices like the DVD and Blu-Ray drive was very easy; I didn’t have to mess around with a bunch of screws. The 3.5″ SD card reader was a little more difficult to install because it needed to go into a cage-like 5.25″ enclosure, which required screws and didn’t interface well with the tool-less design, but using a few screws here was a small price to pay for the otherwise incredibly fast build. Speaking of the tool-less design, my 5.25″ devices feel secure and adding more would be easy if desired. It’s difficult to describe the fasteners, but suffice it to say that each 5.25″ bay requires only one, and it takes about two seconds to position and fasten it.

Second, the removable HDD cage. This thing makes me want to wax rhapsodic. The other times in my life when I’ve built a computer or opened up a case, I’ve had to plan very carefully what to do and when to do it, because a lot of things connect near the middle and bottom of an ATX motherboard – SATA, PCI and PCIe cards, USB connectors, jumper pins, LED plugs, all kinds of crap. If I screwed something up, I was doomed to fiddle around with needlenose pliers and a flashlight for up to an hour because there isn’t enough room in your average tower case to get a hand in there and still be able to see. With the M9, the HDD cage (with attached forward-facing fan) is held in place by three more of the tool-less fasteners that I mentioned above. Removing those lets you slide the cage right out the front of the case, then reach in there to manipulate plugs, jumpers or components. I didn’t even have to unplug the HDD to do it.

Regarding the rest of the build:

The OCZ 2×2 GB of DDR2-6400 went in with no problems. The motherboard had two yellow and two black memory slots, and the instructions said to use the two yellow ones first. No worries. I am aware that a 32-bit OS will not recognize more than 3 GB of RAM, but I may upgrade to a 64-bit OS at some point, and $80 for even 3 GB OCZ at 800 MHz was a pretty good deal. Plus I don’t have to mix and match sets of RAM sticks, which has a slight correlation with memory errors.

I installed the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro fan just like in the instructions, with the fan side facing towards the front of the PC so it blows air towards the back. Incidentally, the M9 case has a fan which will help carry the hot air out of the case. The fan is completely enormous; much larger than the stock fan that came with the E8400 CPU, and side-facing rather than top-facing.

The XFX Geforce 9800GTX is, indeed, a huge card. It isn’t quite large enough to require drastic modification of the case (i.e. using a hacksaw to cut out chunks of it), but it is large enough that the bottom 5.25″ bay of the M9 case is not really conveniently accessible. I don’t foresee this being a problem; right now I’m using three of the six 5.25″ bays and I doubt I will ever need them all. However, hooking up another one for SLI will be somewhat difficult because it will require a lot of messing around with the HDD cage and the SATA connections. Bottom line, in terms of form factor, you can definitely fit an XFX GeForce 9800GTX into a Thermaltake M9 1000 case unless you plan on having six 5.25″ devices, and in that case you’re probably nuts.

I will hit the power button for the first time tonight (after I get the OS), and will likely have to spend a few hours or days downloading new drivers and resolving hiccups. Part of the fun.

Offer Letter and PC System Building

Two awesome things happened today. The first and most important one is that I got an offer letter for a Financial Analyst position at the NPO that I talked about a few days ago. The offer looks good and while there is a part of me that wants to negotiate on the salary or the benefits, the overall package is probably 25%-30% better than I was expecting to make as a 24-year-old MBA holder in summer 2008. I will take it and be generally delighted.

This also furthers my career goals toward corporate financial analysis. While it takes me further from the equity research side, that doesn’t bother me all that much. For 99.9% of people, there is a threshold of wealth that they will never pass over without sacrificing their happiness and personal life. The other 0.1% are the empire builders who also have/had fantastic luck; who have had the opportunities and the personal drive to make it to the top of the pyramid and who have enjoyed the process. I may make this happen at some point, but in the meantime I’ll be pretty happy to simply do budgeting and financial analysis for non-profit organizations like hospitals, colleges, etc. that have missions that I can believe in. I’ll make enough money to be happy and prudently invest a portion of my earnings so I can build a safety cushion, and maybe one day I’ll call up some of the badasses I’ve met over the years to start a new company.

The other cool thing that happened is that I finally bought a new PC – or rather, the components which I will use to build a new PC. I used Newegg for most of the parts (about $750 worth, basically everything except for the CPU, the case and the monitor) and Micro Center for the rest of it (about $500 worth). After I get all the mail-in rebates fulfilled it should come to about $1250.

Here’s the build:

BLU-RAY ROM LITE-ON|DH-4O1S-08 4X R – Blu-Ray and DVD drive at $139.99
SPK LOGITECH|S-220 2.1 980-000023 – 2.1 Speaker System at $20.99
CPU COOLER|ARCTIC P4|ACFZ7-PRO R – CPU Fan at $31.99
HD 640G|WD 7K 16M WD6400AAKS – Western Digital 3.0GB/sec 7200 RPM HD, 640 GB at $89.99
MB ASUS P5Q PRO 775 P45 RT – Motherboard, 2x PCIe 2.0 and 2 PCI slots, socket 775 at $149.99
VGA XFX PVT98FYDF9 GF9800GTX 512M R – Video Card at $189.99
CARD READER ROSEWILL|RCR-102 RTL – flash memory card reader, internal (3.5″ drive) at $14.99
MEM 2Gx2|GSK F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ R – 4 GB of G.Skill DDR2 at 800 MHz at $79.99
IPSG Intel® Boxed Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 – CPU at $159.99
Acer America Corporation AL2216Wbd 22″ Widescreen Digital/Analog LCD at $239.99
Thermaltake USA Inc M9 ATX Gaming Mid Tower at $79.99
Antec Truepower 650W ATX Power Supply at $60 (from a friend)

I’m not exactly an enthusiast – these parts are chosen mainly because they uniformly have good ratings and are top sellers, and I’ve done the research to make sure there aren’t any reported compatibility issues. Their comment history in Newegg (which is a great example of a Sales 2.0 business model) is almost uniformly good, with negative comments generally attributable to things like overclocking performance or just a rare bad part. I have no plans to OC anything; just being able to play Blu-Ray movies as well current and future games at medium settings will be delightful after making do with a laptop with a 14″ screen and integrated graphics for two years.

So there it is – a new job and my present to myself.

Sailing Clinic Part 1 – Speed and Tacking

This is a continuation and expansion of my earlier post on sailing lessons, so I can get things straight and get ready to take a solo exam at some point in the next few weeks. If you’re not interested, skip it.

I’m still not going to expound on the rigging or anything; that’s information that’s easily found on other sites and it’s not that interesting. The boat is a Mercury, maybe 14 feet long, with a nice deep centerboard which is awesome for letting the boat lean really far over when you have a lot of speed, and really horrible when you’re sailing in a low-tide situation with lots of sandbars. In low wind conditions, it helps to have a jib or jibsheet up, which is a smaller sail in front of the mast that basically exists to direct more apparent wind at the mainsheet, and to catch wind when you’re running (sailing directly before the wind). For all examples, assume that the wind is blowing due north, and there is no jib.

As a side note, that word “jib” rhymes with “rib” and has no relationship with the verb “to jibe” or “to gybe.” That word rhymes with “imbibe” and means to change course across the wind’s heading while moving downwind.

So. Principle 1 is that speed equals control. This is because maneuvering requires use of the rudder, and the rudder changes your course by directing the flow of the water to one side or another. If you’re not moving, the water isn’t flowing, so the only maneuvering ability you have involves “swimming” or “sculling” with the rudder…basically, you move the rudder like a fish’s tail to get some slight forward momentum. Your sail controls your speed and attitude (how far over your boat leans), and your rudder controls your course. Evolutions like docking, where you may not have the luxury of moving with the wind, generally require a lot of well-managed momentum so you don’t end up facing straight into the wind with no speed (this point of sail is called “in irons”).

Principle 2 is that speed, in and of itself, is not always the most important thing. Generally when you’re sailing you’re trying to go somewhere, and that somewhere may not have anything to do with where the wind is blowing that day. You want speed, but you want to be moving towards where you need to go. Sailing races require a lot of instinct and calculation for figuring out how to get the most “velocity made good,” i.e. to choose the most efficient way of getting to the end point. If this point is straight upwind, you’re going to have to do a lot of “tacking” – moving in a zig-zag pattern, across the direction of the wind.

So remember that the wind is blowing north. We want to move south. We can find an efficient point of sail by setting a southwest course, at a “close haul” – that is, with your sail kept at very tiny angle relative to your boat’s keel (the line between the front and the back) – and then performing a tack.

The first thing you do when you tack is to make sure that you have enough speed and (obviously) you’re not in danger of hitting anything, and that your sail is, indeed, fairly close to the keel and under control. Then you slam the rudder all the way over in order to turn as fast as possible. Your course should pass through the direction of the wind at the same time as your boom (the big heavy thing with the sail’s foot attached to it that makes an L-shape with the mast) swings over to the other side of the boat.

Here’s the tricky thing – there are two separate things that you need to concentrate on. First, you (and anyone else) need to be very conscious about how your weight is distributed. Since you’re in control, you must be on the opposite side of the boat from the sail, so you need to quickly move to the other side of the boat and switch which of your hands are holding the tiller/rudder and the line that controls the sail. If you do not move to the opposite side from where the sail is, in a strong wind the boat may capsize. The weight of you, your passengers or crew, and your cargo works to counterbalance the force that wind exerts on your sail and hence your boat. If you believe you are going over, ease your sail so that less of it is exposed to the wind. You will sacrifice speed and control, but it’s better than unexpectedly going swimming.

(Because of its deep centerboard, the Mercury can heel over incredibly far – about 60 degrees – and remain stable. I am told that you can sail a Mercury with perfect stability even while it’s heeled so far over that water is coming in over the leeward (downwind) side. Ask around or do some research to determine how far over your boat can lean while retaining stability, and practice because your weight and how you manage your weight in the boat make a huge difference. I have to remind myself of this stuff whenever I go sailing, since my first boats were canoes and kayaks, and if you’re leaned over more than about 30 degrees in one of those boats you are boned.)

Second, straighten out your rudder just as you and the boom switch sides. This prevents you from oversteering and simply heading straight back 180 degrees from where you were going before. If this maneuver was performed correctly, you should now be at about a 90 degree angle from where you were before, or heading approximately southeast, still at a close haul but on the opposite side. You can do this as many times as you like in order to “beat” upwind, but remember to get up enough speed each time that you can complete the tack.

This concludes the introductory sailing lesson on speed and tacking. Next (i.e. whenever I feel like it), jibing and points of sail.

Once More Into the Breach

I’m preparing for an interview this afternoon for a nonprofit company here in Boston, and really looking forward to it. The opening is for a Financial Analyst with a hefty load of budgeting analysis responsibilities, and assistance with providing information for financial reporting. I’d report directly to the CFO. Hopefully I’d be able to get occasional exposure to the board of the directors, because it has some pretty impressive resumes attached to it. In general I’m looking forward to the interview and I really want the job.

The opportunity came through a placement agency, and I was able to get some good information regarding what they’re looking for and how to tailor the way I present myself. I have a good due diligence package including a financial summary for the company, a LinkedIn dossier of the CFO (since I’ll be meeting with him in a few hours), and a detailed version of the job posting. The salary looks pretty good, and this job definitely fits within my career plan. Getting some good corporate financial analysis and budgeting experience would put me onto the CFO or Controller path ten or fifteen years down the road.

Thinking positive thoughts now.

Prospects

I have an interview set for Monday for a financial analyst role at a nonprofit organization. I’m doing serious research in preparation for the interview, because this would be a really excellent job to cut my teeth on in the finance industry. Budgeting, forecasting, research and general corporate finance. Interestingly, this opportunity came through a placement agency, which is excellent because it makes my due diligence easier and because it gives me an edge when compared with random external applicants.

Here I will digress into communication theory. First off, if a decision is important (buying a car, choosing an apartment, hiring for a position), advice that comes from a person with whom the decision-maker has a pre-existing relationship is generally given a lot of credit. Second – relating to the placebo effect – people tend to value things that they pay for more than things that are cheap or free.

However, I still have to ace the interview.  Which means brushing up on my corporate finance and my advanced Excel.  I’ll probably create a few pivot tables and VLookup cells just to stay up to date; it’s been a few months since the last time I used either feature.  I’d like to know whether the company uses Office 2003 or Office 2007, but that isn’t something that the placement agency is likely to know.  I’ll create a folder of documents on the CFO, the company, and anyone else I’m likely to run into (LinkedIn is great for that).  I’ll plan my route there and back to avoid the possibility of being late. Shine my shoes. All that fun stuff.

I also have an analyst position at a downtown firm on the back burner, but they’ve taken three months, two interviews, two phone conversations and innumerable e-mails, and I still haven’t gotten a direct answer. So at this point I’m proceeding under the assumption that the answer is no, and if I’m surprised, that will be excellent. It costs nothing to follow up anyway.

The Upside of Recruiters

I’m a big believer in recruiters and placement agencies, but only the good ones. A bad recruiter will find out your name, company and contact info; then spam you with phone calls and e-mails about opportunities. He is attempting to flip you – to turn a fee by getting you into a new position for his benefit, not for yours. The ideal situation for this recruiter would be if you took the new position and stayed there for a year. At that point you could expect more “opportunities,” and ideally you would make another move. In this way, the recruiter would make an easy $3,000-$9,000 off of you on an annual basis. Even if his agency takes a 50% cut, with thirty of these ideal candidates on his list, this recruiter will make more than $80k per year. That’s until word gets around that he’s shady and recruits from his clients. Generally they try not to do that (or are contractually bound to avoid it), but it happens.

Good recruiters operate on two levels. First, they keep a list of active and passive candidates, most of whom are (ideally) currently employed. They keep track of their candidates’ skills, abilities, desired positions and workplace environment preferences. If you’ve spent time in food service, developing and maintaining this database is the staffing equivalent of side work – chopping lemons for hot tea, preparing table settings, etc. It’s the stuff that doesn’t directly generate revenue, but makes your job run far more smoothly when things get hot.

Then they have clients and openings. These are the firms that have positions that need filling, and the people at those firms who liaise with the recruiter and communicate about those opportunities. Good recruiters will post these positions on job boards, both internal and external, and at the same time start thinking about who on their list would be interested. Then they start calling their candidates – the ones who have expressed a desire to move on, or who would be making a substantial jump in salary or prestige or general fit.

Good recruiters earn their fees by taking all the expensive, time-consuming, pain-in-the-butt aspects of staffing – getting a bunch of resumes, conducting initial screening to make sure that applicants actually have the skills they say they do, doing the actual interviewing, running background and credit checks on the short list of applicants – streamlining them, and just presenting a handful of really decent prospects to their client companies, who can then take their pick.

This is excellent for both the candidate (who doesn’t have to actively job hunt, or at least spend as much effort doing so, and who can use the recruiter as a source of information) and the clients (who don’t have to have their HR people waste a month filling each open position and who generally enjoy a higher success rate with their new hires, if the recruiter is good). And that is why the clients are willing to pay the recruiters a fee, generally 4% to 10% of a new hire’s annual salary, spread out over six months or a year to minimize the risk of the hire not working out.

Incidentally, this gives the recruiter an incentive to negotiate a higher salary for you and to be relatively up-front about it.

If you find a good recruiter, keep him or her in your business card binder, and send an e-mail once or twice a year with a few words on how you’re doing in your position. Because if you do, then the recruiter will keep an eye out for openings that move you upward in terms of salary, or fit, or prestige, and e-mail you if they come up. He (or she) will not waste your time with repeated phone calls or e-mails, and will respect your “no.” Like a good salesperson, a good recruiter makes a living by creating deals that benefit everyone involved – himself, the client and the candidate.

Sailing Lessons

Now for something completely different.

I took my sixth sailing lesson today.  UMass Boston offers them free of charge to its students, graduate and undergraduate, on small Mercury boats.  After a minimum of six lessons, I can take the qualifying exam and be eligible to sign out a boat and go solo.

When I was about fourteen years old, I made a list of things to learn how to do decently well over the next few decades (i.e. while I’m still young enough to enjoy doing them).  I’ve already crossed off snorkeling, first aid/CPR, wilderness survival, firearm use and safety, bartending (added that at age 16), woodworking, plumbing, building and maintaining a desktop computer, car maintenance, writing a simple computer program (used C++), and now sailing a small boat.

The list is still pretty deep and includes skydiving, defensive driving, scuba diving, golf, lacrosse, piloting and other fun stuff – you can see the trend towards the expensive stuff and the things that don’t come from Boy Scouts.  Sailing is a special case; I could have learned it in Boy Scouts but never got around to it.  I had resigned myself to having to wait until I could afford the time and money for lessons, when lo and behold the offer letter came from UMass Boston.  Research into the school and its Graduate Assistantship program had revealed that I could A) go to b-school without debt and B) take sailing lessons free of charge.

The format of the lessons is relatively simple.  You make an appointment (every hour on the hour), you show up on time (five minutes and you’re doomed to wait), and you get in the boat with a tanned guy or girl in a life jacket.  You rig the boat under close supervision – there’s a definite order to it, and several knots that have to be right – and hoist the sail.  Then you’re off.

When sailing a small boat, you handle the tiller (rudder) and the mainsheet (the line that controls the mainsail).  By controlling these with one in each hand and distributing your weight properly, you can do whatever you want with the boat.  There is a heavy metal plate called a centerboard in the middle of the boat, which hangs below the keel and provides resistance against side-slipping when the wind is hitting your sail.  When you have some good speed, the centerboard on a Mercury helps you keep from capsizing even in a very strong wind.  The really good sailors (which I’m not – not yet, at least) will lean out over the water to counterbalance the effects of a high wind, and get some really serious speed even though the wind is pushing the boat about 40 degrees off vertical.

I started my nautical career in a canoe, so this is unsettling to watch and even worse to experience.

I’m not going to go into rigging, or points of sail, but I will say a little bit about jibing (rhymes with “imbibing”) and tacking because I think they’re interesting. Jibing is changing your direction through the direction of the wind while heading downwind, tacking is doing so while heading upwind. So picture a clock. The wind is blowing towards the 12:00 position and you’re sailing towards the 10:00 position. Now you want to turn to the right, towards the 2:00 position; maybe because your buddy in the other boat just fell over and you want to help him out. You need to perform a jibe, because your sail is currently on the right side of the boat and now it has to move to the left side. This requires some coordination because the boom (the big heavy thing attached to the mast and the sail) is at about head height, and it must by necessity swing over to the other side of the boat. Generally you haul in your sail as much as possible before executing a jibe or a tack, but sometimes you can’t or you don’t.

I haven’t actually seen a slam-jibe (a fast and relatively uncontrolled variation of this move) go horribly wrong, but I’m told that the results can be memorable. Like, “guy-gets-clocked-in-the-head-and-goes-overboard” memorable.

The Recruiter’s Perspective

A lot of my friends look at me funny when they realize that I’ve worked for more than a year as a recruiter, and yet I don’t have a job yet.

First off, I’m picky.  There are jobs available – in many cases, jobs with decent money and benefits – but they don’t fit into my career plan.  Secondly (and more importantly), the skills I developed to recruit niche professionals and consumers for market research projects, and to recruit engineers and support personnel, are not perfectly generalizable to getting a job in the finance industry.  As excellent as that would be.

I don’t mean that they’re of no use whatsoever – far to the contrary.  During my time as a recruiter, I picked up a lot of tips for job searching, resume writing and interviewing, which I will take the liberty of setting down here. So this entry could be subtitled, “The right way to get a job.”

1) Make a career plan. Getting a job is easy; you’re only unemployable if you refuse (or don’t have the ability or facility) to clean yourself up and communicate decently with other people.  Getting a job which moves you toward where you want to be in five or ten years is more difficult. So first, develop a goal. I want to be a corporate financial analyst or an equity researcher in five years, and CFO of a mid-sized (50-500 employees, $10 million to $100 million) company in ten or fifteen years. Figure out how to get there, with interim positions along the way. In no particular order; mine are Analyst, Research Associate, Portfolio Manager, Finance Manager, and some others. It’s worth applying for jobs that don’t fit into the overall goal, as fallback options or if you need the money, but if you’re reading the offer letter, consider whether the job fits into your plan.

2) Do your due diligence. Learn what it takes to succeed in your industry, and make sure you know what the interim steps are along the way. Figure out who the big firms are, the major players, the periodicals that you should read. Maybe you should subscribe to the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, or other trade publications. When you go into interviews, know as much as possible about the company, the job, the job requirements, and the person who will be interviewing you (and be able to relate all of these to your own background and skills). If your interviewer got his degree from Boston College and you didn’t, make sure you’re not uncomplimentary if you’re asked why you chose the school you did. If he published a case study, read it and have some intelligent comments.

3) Build your brand. This could be subtitled “Actively Network,” because the two concepts are intertwined. You want to present a favorable image of yourself at every opportunity, and make as many opportunities as possible for you to present that image. This doesn’t mean “Go to every Monster.com job fair,” nor does it mean “spam popular online forums with comments that include your name and a link to your LinkedIn profile.” Rather, it means that you should make friends in your field, get business cards, attend training seminars (and do your research beforehand so you look like somebody worth knowing), keep relationships alive with your old classmates and coworkers, and generally think about what kind of image you want to present and the best ways to do so.

4) Don’t neglect your training. If you want to be in marketing, you should have some graphic design background and/or experience. If you want to be in sales, keep current on your relationship management and communications training. If you want to be in Finance, make sure you have solid Excel skills and think about becoming a CFA charterholder (I just got my prep materials last week, by the way – six fat textbooks and some postcards).

5) Invest time and maybe money in your resume and interviewing skills. This one is kind of a throwaway, but worth mentioning. Your personality, talents, skills, abilities, ambitions, goals and dreams are encapsulated in that document; because if you don’t get through the door and into an interview, nothing else matters. So e-mail your resume to recruiters and ask for their advice. Companies like Kforce will often help you edit it and better emphasize the good stuff while downplaying the things which aren’t so complimentary. Once you get through the door, you need to impress the hiring manager in the interview. Dress in a suit unless specifically instructed otherwise. Do your due diligence on the company. Do some mock interviews and ideally get to the point where you look forward to interviewing. Or fake it.

6) Remember that every line on your resume will follow you forever. So don’t take a job you don’t want unless you don’t have a choice. On the up side though, this is a good incentive to gun for the assignments and the jobs that will make you look good forever, and make for good stories at the cocktail parties, business school classes, and even interviews. So do that month-long training seminar in Beijing, and participate in the pre-IPO financial statement review and reconciliation.

Each and every one of these goals applies whether you’re actively job searching or not. Always think about where you are and where you want to be, always build your brand, always keep your training up to date, and always stay informed of developments in your industry. Keep your resume current so you’re less sandbagged if your company folds, you get RIF’d, a merger or acquisition occurs – or if an incredible opportunity comes along. Interviewing skills are invaluable in any situation where you have to relate to people or persuade them to accept a point of view. And knowing that your background follows you everywhere may dissuade you from making a poor decision at the post-project cocktail party.

Ipso Post Fourtho

The Fourth of July in Boston is something to see.  This was the second one I’ve had the fortune to be in the city for, and last year it rained throughout the display.  A rare piece of good weather ensured that about half a million people got to see one of the largest fireworks displays in the world against a clear sky, with thundering reports echoing off of buildings and multicolored reflections off the surface of the Charles River.  My aunt and uncle came in from the Philippines to check out colleges for their son, who’s eighteen and searching for a place to do his undergraduate degree, and they timed their visit to be here for the festivities.  They didn’t seem disappointed.

I still don’t have a job.  I’ve sent out fifteen applications over the past three days, and updated my presence on all of the job sites to reflect the fact that I’m still searching.  The upside of a three-day weekend is that all of my friends are off work as well, so it’s a good time for socializing.  The downside is that no recruiter in his or her right mind is going to be checking their Taleo inbox.

I enjoyed the respite, though.  I’m making the recruitment statistics work for me.  I know that generally it takes fifty resumes to get five interviews, and a single job offer.  I’m at about eighty resumes sent out, ten interviews and one offer, which I turned down because as good as the money looked, I didn’t want to sell insurance products for a living.  I’m hoping that some of the past few days’ worth of resumes and cover letters will hit home, and get a few more interviews for this coming week.

Exposition

Seven years ago, when I was in my first year of undergrad, I deliberately chose not to work.  I chose my classes depending more on what time of day they were offered, than their utility to my major and my situation.  I heeded the advice which is still proffered in abundance to “do what you enjoy doing and study things you like,” rather than “choose a path and make a five-year plan.”

The result of this was that I played a lot of CounterStrike and slept from 2 am to 12 pm five or six days a week.

After the first year I got my act together.  I began working 30-40 hours per week to make sure I wouldn’t go into debt and to begin building my resume.  My grades were relatively low, but I lived a better life than most of my classmates – and there were no student loans on the horizon.  This was a mistake in retrospect, but not one that I can wholeheartedly regret (as though it would do any good).  The problem, of course, is that grades are important, and your major is even more important.  A BA in Communications does not, repeat NOT, lend itself to much beyond sales, customer service, public relations or journalism.  I did it because I enjoyed it and it was useful in my daily life.  However, it does not cross career boundaries well.

Once I realized this and extricated my head from my ass, I was already in my fourth year of school, and five or six academic quarters of “A’s” in relatively hard-science courses don’t make up for twelve quarters of “B’s” and “C’s.”  Basically, the damage was done, but I rolled with the punches, did a better job.  I’d been working full time and I cut back to part time.  I applied to MBA programs on the understanding that it was a good general degree – a better one than the BA in Communications.  I specialized in Finance for the reasons outlined in the “About Me” section (over there on the right, guys, at the top of this page).  And when I got to school, I worked as a recruiter because my sales and service skills were highly transferable, and recruiting (strangely enough) is a lucrative business if you work at it.

So now we’re up to speed.  From here on out, the job search is on.  Actually, it’s been on for four months or so, but now I’ll be writing about it.