As the crow flies

The Job Search

I decided that I might as well continue to post things up here, although they may not be that interesting. It could be fun to look back on what I was thinking at the time. So here I go.

The Job Search

Yes, the job search, a project that I've been working on for the past month. Somedays it is going pretty well, and other days I feel like quitting. But what would I quit from? I don't have a job. So I keep looking. Today I am having a decent day of job searching as I found two jobs online that I am going to apply for. One is down in Oakland for some mysterious company. I hate those personnel agencies that post job openings for companies. They don't post any information about the company, just the job description. Sometimes it is so vague - "Electrical Engineer: perform majority of electrical design duties, create technical documentation, lead meetings and report to Lead Project Engineer, must have 5+ years experience in design." Do I actually want that job? What does the company do? What sort of company is it? I'm not just looking for a job, I'm looking for a company to work for. Today's mysterious company job sounds like the skills I have, and it relates to medical devices which is one of the things I want to do. The other job I found today is at a place called Westport Innovations in Vancouver. They work with diesel engines and fuel injectors, converting them to natural gas and possibly hydrogen. It sounds pretty cutting edge which is what I want.

I went down to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to the University of Washington Career Fair. Lockheed Martin invited me. Well not personally, but on their website they said "We want to meet you!" in their recent graduate section, and said to come to the closest career fair. So I did, and found out that I can't work for them anyway because I'm not a US citizen. You have to be a US citizen to work for any of those companies that have contracts with the US Department of Defense. The good thing about that is that I no longer have to decide if I want to work for a company that makes missiles and other sorts of things that blow people up. I couldn't decide how I felt about that, but the decision was made for me.

There were some other companies down there that interested me like Kenworth, Fluke and some biomedical companies. I found out yesterday that I have an interview with one of the biomed companies, Stryker, who is in San Jose, but the interview is in Seattle. So next week I've got to go back down to Seattle. That's good news, although there are 35 other people being interviewed on the same day. So that trip down to Seattle produced some results.

Other than job searching I don't find myself really doing that much. This last weekend I went away to my friend Nick's cabin with some other guys for a manly getaway. We ate lots and lots of meat, did some walking in the woods, some caber tossing, among other manly feats. We also did some discussion on King David. I stole some pictures (Ben if you mind let me know) of Nick tossing a caber so here it is... (For those of you who don't know, a caber is a large log)

posted by Aaron @ 1:39 PM