practice makes perfect?!

well as you see i've been LACKING in blog entries from the past week, i totally attribute that to me reducing my starbucks from 2/day to 3/week. i was irritable and grouchy (more than usual, and NON PMS related) and my reaction time was slower and brain functions were slower, but i digress.

so i know i bitch and moan on the blog, but perhaps i can interject here (it's still monday, i'm still delusional on caffeine) with a slight optimistic view?!

when we were at the last semester at McGill i was hella scared of the whole interviewing and job hunting process (yes, 5 years in California has instilled "hella" into my everyday conversation whenever i can). i decided to tackle it the way i do most things - get on it until i've overcome or die trying.
i sent my resume out to every freaking company that was on site for career fairs, that had postings on the job boards in the CS/Engr buildings, grabbed contact info of local software companies and sent them along even. I sent out 30 resumes. Got about 12 interviews. went to all 12 interviews, probably got 4 companies calling me back for 2nd+ rounds. and at the end i got 1 *ONE* offer.

so it used to bum me out because 29 companies rejected me! wow. of the 30 ONLY 1 company wanted to hire me, and i had a 3.54 GPA graduating from "the Havard of Canada" (so they say). WTF :)

but you know what, since then, i've had half a dozen interviews and had been rejected by many MUCH bigger named companies than previous: Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, eBay, Google... but interviews don't scare me at all, people actually gave me feedback that i interview very strongly and that i represent myself very well in them. So even though all those companies have rejected me, the experience in the rejection enriched my life much more than a job back in the day with any of the companies aforementioned.

i guess what i'm trying to 'preach' at - the moral of the story, is that if you never try, you'll never fail, but you'll never succeed either. and if you've tried and failed, learn something from it, chalk it up to your experiences and it'll be useful going forward. given different star alignments, things may fall in line differently. and of course it's easier said than done to brush the dust off after a fall and get back on the feet, i think time to wallow a bit in self pity is good... but just know that every fall teaches you something about yourself, and the amount of nerve it took to attempt the jump, and the recovery you are capable of to pick yourself up.

just think, if i've never gotten my 7 F and D in my engineering courses, i would never have switch to comp sci and be in the valley now. funny, for the longest time at every interview, my interviewers would always ask "your transcript REALLY intrigue me, how did you go from flunking out of engineering to getting all A's and graduating with a 3.54 GPA?"

they didn't CARE that i've failed, they cared about my ability to pick up from the pits of despair (Princess Bride reference) and turn things around so dramatically the other way.

hang in there..