The Job Search

I'm about to embark on that most scary of college experiences, the Job Search. I'm waiting on one last permission from someone to use them as a reference, then off I go.

The scariest part is Where will I go? One thing is certain, and that's that I'm not staying here. Michigan's a nice enough place to live, if you don't mind going weeks at a time under cloud cover; temperatures don't get too extreme in either direction as a rule (though there are exceptions), the only natural disaster that we are even remotely affected by are tornados, and it's nice green land with trees & stuff... but a bustling hive of tech activity it is not.

The least scary part is definately the transition to work life; I've been working in a professional environment since my second semester of school, and I've experienced several summers that were effectively a "real job". Frankly, I am looking forward to that part; I'm still enjoying school but I hate the way that homework is always hanging over your head. One of my priorities is to get a job that I can mostly leave at work. (I can tolerate some exceptions, and you couldn't stop me from thinking about design issues while eating dinner if you tried, but I do not want to be an on-call server admin.)

In the meantime, uncertainty. Will anyone even contact me? Will the further away jobs be willing to foot the transportation bill for the interview, or at least help out, if they're interested? (I'm in a good economic position compared to most students in my place, but I could still only swing one, maybe two trips to an interview on my own before I am completely out of money. What's common practice? I don't know!) Of all the things I have to do, this is both the most exciting, and in a strange way the one I am most reluctant to do. As much as I'm ready to leave the student lifestyle behind, it is how I've spent the majority of my life to this point. (It is my experience that it takes me about three months for the feeling that Something Is Due Tommorow to go away. This is cruel because that's about how long a summer vacation is.)

Oh, and on the off chance you're just itching to hire me, speak now or hold your peace for a while. ;-) I have many "career goals" I'd like to pursue (I find the concept of a "career goal" placed on the resume stupid, because the career goal is generally a glorified version of "I want the job you're offering". But when in Rome...), but the top one is anything to do with helping people communicate with each other, which is probably the strongest theme weaving its way through my projects, both released (tcp.im and the requisite Jabber work, CustomBlogPost, my work with LON-CAPA since education is a form of communication) and otherwise (my outliner, Spam Writer (the name of the tool in the screenshot), assorted stuff not generally useful so not worth releasing). Here's the resume, though that will probably be updated in a day or two; the info is accurate but I've been polishing it now that it needs to be "production quality", instead of just "hobby code".