Tough News, Unlooping, and Mozing Forward.

Good morning job hunters, full-timers and everyone else in-between! Friday, I decided to take the day off from posting on LinkedIn. This was for a pretty hypocritical reason on my part. You see, Friday I heard back from Varsity Tutors and the response wasn't quite what I was hoping. I had felt like the phone screen went well, but when I opened their email instead of seeing a description of next steps, it was a kind email informing me that I would not be continuing in the process. 

This definitely took me down a notch for a few hours. The main thought I had in my mind was "What went wrong?" which quickly morphed into "What did I DO wrong?". This kind of negative internal discussion gets you nowhere. In fact, I believe it holds you back. For those few hours, I was not studying, networking, or applying for jobs. Wasted time. When I realized the downfall of this bellyaching, I began to think of ways I could be proactive with these questions. I eventually reformulated what I was asking to "What could I do better for next time?". This was exactly the question I emailed the recruiter. Turns out, I did nothing "wrong", I just didn't have enough experience for the current positions being offered. I want to say thank you to Jason Jaffe (Sr. Recruiter at Varsity Tutors) for their professionality and making my short experience with Varsity Tutors a positive one. This is my question to you, reader. How does one get the industry experience needed for entry-level software engineer positions? I need to be doing whatever that is!

Not all is negative though, I had a great conversation with unloop on Friday and look forward to speaking with them again. Also, I have a phone interview with Moz on Wednesday. After reading up on them, I knew I had to apply. Their culture is truly what brought me in. From what I could see, this is definitely a place I want to be part of. I just hope they'll feel the same about me. Saturday night, I figured out how to deploy with AWS and deployed my new portfolio site. In the future, I will post a link to the said site, once I get rid of the known bugs.

Also, I read an article about applying for jobs after being unemployed for a while. Now, I have only been unemployed for a week, but this actually got me thinking about something else. I worked under six months at both Pavia System Inc. and BaseMap Inc. and I had not addressed this in my resume. I originally figured this wasn't such a big deal because I could explain both situations in phone screens or interviews. I now realize that a recruiter could look past my resume because of this and there would not be a chance for me to explain what happened. So, I have now added a "Reason for Leaving" (working on a better way to say this) bullet in my experience section of my resume that states things like "company funding", "internship" and "career change". I am open to other suggestions (comments?).

unloop:

Moz:

So, what am I up to today and moving forward:

• Study, study, study for the Moz phone interview (there will be technical questions).
• Apply on more jobs
• Change from studying Java to C# due to market needs.
• Tomorrow, I am volunteering for Young Authors Day at Wing Luke Elementary School in South Seattle.

This is all for now! Remember, you are amazing, you are intelligent, so find a way to get back in the game!