Friday, October 08, 2004
Job interviews
Well, I've dropped my other math class due to business. I dropped it on Wednesday, right after class. Here's why:
- I took a look at the homework that was due Friday. I didn't immediately know how to do the problems, but it looked like the sort of thing I could figure out after going back over my notes and re-reading the relevant sections of the book. I figured this would mean I'd have to put in about 6-8 hours to do the homework.
- I have an interview scheduled next week. This interview is during my math class, which means I'd have to miss it. This would be really bad to miss, since the midterm is on Friday and thus we will probably do review in class on Wednesday.
- The midterm is a week from today. I think I may know enough of the material now to pull off a C on in, but I'm not happy with that kind of mediocre performance, especially since I know that I could get my knowledge up to an acceptable level if I study. I just don't have time to study.
- The amount of time I've been putting into this class is probably enough to get a passing grade, but it's taking time away from important things like job interviews, work for other classes, and of course time for sleep. Dropping the class allows me to put more time into these more important things.
- I didn't turn in the homework last week. I took a look at it a few days before it was due, and it looked easy, so I put it off until the day before it was due. That day I spent about 6 hours, and wasn't able to get anything worth turning in. This means that I got a 0 on the assignment, which would have been bad. The professor does give extra credit work, so I could theoretically pulled my grade up again with that, but that would have required even MORE time.
So, the end result is that I dropped my math class, and now I'm down to 13 credits. Hopefully this will be reasonable, because this means that I have to pass all of my classes this semester and next semester to graduate in May.
So what else have I been doing? Well, I had an interview with National Instruments yesterday. I think it went fairly well, which is much better than I expected. I really don't like being on the spot, being evaluated, giving speeches or presentations or anything along those lines. I get very nervous, but for this interview I managed to overcome my nervousness. That's what I consider a success.
I hadn't thought about working at NI, but they preselected me for an interview, and they only get to preselect a few students, so I figured that I'd see why they were interested in hiring me.
The guy doing my interview was an analog hardware designer, which was nice, since I also want to do hardware design. I want to do digital design, which is probably good because it means that I probably know more about the subject than he does.
First he asked me a bit about the classes that I've taken, and asked me to describe what I did during my internship two summers ago. Then he asked me the HR-type questions, and finally the technical questions. At the info session the previous night, we'd been warned that we'd be asked two HR-type questions, and then the night before I'd seen on their job description that two of their desired skills for a hardware designer were "Initiative and Persistence," so I figured that's what they would ask about, and came prepared to talk about those two.
The first HR-type question I was asked was to "talk about a time where I showed initiative, or went above and beyond what was expected." I was prepared for this, and talked about how I did much more than expected in one of my lab classes.
The second HR-type question, and he said that I couldn't use the same example, was to explain a situation where I had to fix a problem and how I went about doing it. This wasn't persistence, but since I'd debugged my program for my current lab class only 2 days ago, I decided to talk about that. I think I rambled too much and didn't talk about the steps and why I did things too well, but I hope he liked my answer.
The technical question was fairly easy. He asked me to draw a D-type flip-flop (sorry for those of you who don't know what that is, you may need to just skip the next few paragraphs). He only wanted a box with the inputs and outputs, not the gate design inside, which is good because I don't remember the insides. He then asked me about what the little triangle on the clock signal input meant. I said that it meant it was edge-triggered (which I know is true). The kicker is that then he drew an input wave and a clock wave, and asked me to draw the output wave. This is really easy, EXCEPT that I couldn't remember for sure if the triangle meant positive edge triggered or negative edge triggered. I thought that positive made more sense, so I went with that and he didn't say anything about me being wrong, so hopefully I guessed right. I've asked several of my friends since then, and they all said they thought it might mean positive rather than negative, but none of them was exactly sure about it either.
At this point I thought the interview was going to be done, since the info session had been very clear about having 2 HR-type and 1 technical question, but evidently that wasn't the case. This guy asked me another technical question. This time he drew a box with inputs A and CLK, and outputs R, G, and B. On each clock cycle, the output is changed to the next letter in an order defined by the value of A. If A=0, then the output should be R-B-G-R-B-G (etc.), and if A=1 the output should be B-G-G-B-G-G (etc.). Then he asked me to draw the state diagram for this unit. I drew a diagram with 4 states, and connected it as best I could, and asked about what should happen on reset. He said not to worry about reset. Then he asked me how many flip-flops it would take to encode the states. I said "minimally, 2. But you could also use 4 and just pass the output around." After that he asked me to number the states (assuming 2 flip-flops), so I did. I made sure to encode it such that the decode logic would be minimal, in case he would notice or in case he asked me to draw it. Then he started asking me a question, "Let's say you are running this, and you get the output .... I can't ask the question I want to ask with the encoding you made. Let me change it." So he changed the encoding to something that was more random, and asked me to say why a certain brief erroneous output might appear on the output signals briefly (it's because he made state R be 00 and state B be 11, so that you have to flip both bits to make the transition). After changing the encoding he said "I've probably given away what I wanted to ask, but anyway ..." and asked me the question. I answered, and then he had me explain how to avoid the problem other than changing the encodings like I did. I said that you could "buffer" the output with a flip-flop, so that the errors didn't propagate, but that that solution would delay the output by one clock cycle.
After that he asked if I had any more questions, and I asked all the questions I'd prepared beforehand. It's really helpful to have experience working in several places, because it allows you to know what are important things to ask about. You can draw from your experience and the differences between the places you've worked when you come up with questions that will tell you something about whether you would like to work at that company.
After he'd answered all my questions, I said thank you, and shook his hand. He said, "Thanks for asking questions. Most people don't ask any questions." I found that amazing, because the one thing that the I feel like the career people have pounded into us the most is that we WILL be asked if we have questions, and we NEED to ask questions. They even provide a list of questions you can ask if you don't have any of your own. I can't believe that people don't ask a single question. I can understand that people don't prepare the other things that they say we should do (I didn't do most of the stuff they told us to, unfortunately), but it really takes no effort to write down a question or two from the list and ask it at the end of the interview.
Anyway, it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. Hopefully I'll get a job offer. I think I'd like to work at the place I interned at, but the people I know there said they don't know if they'll be able to hire anybody yet. One thing I like about NI is that they are also in Austin, TX, which is a fairly nice place, and which is a place I'm a little bit familiar with due to my internship there two summers ago.
Other than that interview, I've been working on homework for my classes. Except last Saturday, where I spent way too long playing Dark Cloud. It took me a little while to get past the first level of the first dungeon, since I kept dying, but eventually I made it. It's so nice to have the cat-girl with you, because whenever I hear a bat I just switch to her, shoot it down, and switch back. Before I often died trying to hit the stupid things with my sword. It's a fun game, but the dungeon got a bit repetitive (randomly generating it each time doesn't do much when there's so little to build it from). I can't figure out what you're supposed to do with those mine carts that you find. It seems to tell me that I have to use some item, but I've tried using every item I can think of and nothing at all seems to work. Perhaps I'll try looking it up online sometime.
The most impressive thing about DC for me was actually the intro. The dancing in the cut-scenes is absolutely amazing. They must have motion captured it, because the movements looked really real. At times I forgot that I was watching a computer generated dance, and thought I was just watching people in costumes dancing. Of course, not all of the movements in this game look real. The whole "people gliding across the ground as their feet move at a different speed" thing needs to be fixed.
Tomorrow is my birthday, so I bought myself a DVD burner (a Pioneer DVR-108, for those of you who care). I'll be putting it into my old G4 tower to give it a test run with burning "Kill the Last Geisha" later this evening.
Sunday I have to meet with some people from my technical expression class. We have to give a presentation on Monday. The material is stuff that only one of our group members (not me) knows about, and the other 4 of us will have to do the best we can. I hope I don't fail.
So here's my abbreviated schedule for next week:
Monday: present
Tuesday: midterm
Wednesday: interview with Guidant
Thursday: unofficial pre-interview with Intel
Friday: interview with HP
Wish me luck!
- I took a look at the homework that was due Friday. I didn't immediately know how to do the problems, but it looked like the sort of thing I could figure out after going back over my notes and re-reading the relevant sections of the book. I figured this would mean I'd have to put in about 6-8 hours to do the homework.
- I have an interview scheduled next week. This interview is during my math class, which means I'd have to miss it. This would be really bad to miss, since the midterm is on Friday and thus we will probably do review in class on Wednesday.
- The midterm is a week from today. I think I may know enough of the material now to pull off a C on in, but I'm not happy with that kind of mediocre performance, especially since I know that I could get my knowledge up to an acceptable level if I study. I just don't have time to study.
- The amount of time I've been putting into this class is probably enough to get a passing grade, but it's taking time away from important things like job interviews, work for other classes, and of course time for sleep. Dropping the class allows me to put more time into these more important things.
- I didn't turn in the homework last week. I took a look at it a few days before it was due, and it looked easy, so I put it off until the day before it was due. That day I spent about 6 hours, and wasn't able to get anything worth turning in. This means that I got a 0 on the assignment, which would have been bad. The professor does give extra credit work, so I could theoretically pulled my grade up again with that, but that would have required even MORE time.
So, the end result is that I dropped my math class, and now I'm down to 13 credits. Hopefully this will be reasonable, because this means that I have to pass all of my classes this semester and next semester to graduate in May.
So what else have I been doing? Well, I had an interview with National Instruments yesterday. I think it went fairly well, which is much better than I expected. I really don't like being on the spot, being evaluated, giving speeches or presentations or anything along those lines. I get very nervous, but for this interview I managed to overcome my nervousness. That's what I consider a success.
I hadn't thought about working at NI, but they preselected me for an interview, and they only get to preselect a few students, so I figured that I'd see why they were interested in hiring me.
The guy doing my interview was an analog hardware designer, which was nice, since I also want to do hardware design. I want to do digital design, which is probably good because it means that I probably know more about the subject than he does.
First he asked me a bit about the classes that I've taken, and asked me to describe what I did during my internship two summers ago. Then he asked me the HR-type questions, and finally the technical questions. At the info session the previous night, we'd been warned that we'd be asked two HR-type questions, and then the night before I'd seen on their job description that two of their desired skills for a hardware designer were "Initiative and Persistence," so I figured that's what they would ask about, and came prepared to talk about those two.
The first HR-type question I was asked was to "talk about a time where I showed initiative, or went above and beyond what was expected." I was prepared for this, and talked about how I did much more than expected in one of my lab classes.
The second HR-type question, and he said that I couldn't use the same example, was to explain a situation where I had to fix a problem and how I went about doing it. This wasn't persistence, but since I'd debugged my program for my current lab class only 2 days ago, I decided to talk about that. I think I rambled too much and didn't talk about the steps and why I did things too well, but I hope he liked my answer.
The technical question was fairly easy. He asked me to draw a D-type flip-flop (sorry for those of you who don't know what that is, you may need to just skip the next few paragraphs). He only wanted a box with the inputs and outputs, not the gate design inside, which is good because I don't remember the insides. He then asked me about what the little triangle on the clock signal input meant. I said that it meant it was edge-triggered (which I know is true). The kicker is that then he drew an input wave and a clock wave, and asked me to draw the output wave. This is really easy, EXCEPT that I couldn't remember for sure if the triangle meant positive edge triggered or negative edge triggered. I thought that positive made more sense, so I went with that and he didn't say anything about me being wrong, so hopefully I guessed right. I've asked several of my friends since then, and they all said they thought it might mean positive rather than negative, but none of them was exactly sure about it either.
At this point I thought the interview was going to be done, since the info session had been very clear about having 2 HR-type and 1 technical question, but evidently that wasn't the case. This guy asked me another technical question. This time he drew a box with inputs A and CLK, and outputs R, G, and B. On each clock cycle, the output is changed to the next letter in an order defined by the value of A. If A=0, then the output should be R-B-G-R-B-G (etc.), and if A=1 the output should be B-G-G-B-G-G (etc.). Then he asked me to draw the state diagram for this unit. I drew a diagram with 4 states, and connected it as best I could, and asked about what should happen on reset. He said not to worry about reset. Then he asked me how many flip-flops it would take to encode the states. I said "minimally, 2. But you could also use 4 and just pass the output around." After that he asked me to number the states (assuming 2 flip-flops), so I did. I made sure to encode it such that the decode logic would be minimal, in case he would notice or in case he asked me to draw it. Then he started asking me a question, "Let's say you are running this, and you get the output .... I can't ask the question I want to ask with the encoding you made. Let me change it." So he changed the encoding to something that was more random, and asked me to say why a certain brief erroneous output might appear on the output signals briefly (it's because he made state R be 00 and state B be 11, so that you have to flip both bits to make the transition). After changing the encoding he said "I've probably given away what I wanted to ask, but anyway ..." and asked me the question. I answered, and then he had me explain how to avoid the problem other than changing the encodings like I did. I said that you could "buffer" the output with a flip-flop, so that the errors didn't propagate, but that that solution would delay the output by one clock cycle.
After that he asked if I had any more questions, and I asked all the questions I'd prepared beforehand. It's really helpful to have experience working in several places, because it allows you to know what are important things to ask about. You can draw from your experience and the differences between the places you've worked when you come up with questions that will tell you something about whether you would like to work at that company.
After he'd answered all my questions, I said thank you, and shook his hand. He said, "Thanks for asking questions. Most people don't ask any questions." I found that amazing, because the one thing that the I feel like the career people have pounded into us the most is that we WILL be asked if we have questions, and we NEED to ask questions. They even provide a list of questions you can ask if you don't have any of your own. I can't believe that people don't ask a single question. I can understand that people don't prepare the other things that they say we should do (I didn't do most of the stuff they told us to, unfortunately), but it really takes no effort to write down a question or two from the list and ask it at the end of the interview.
Anyway, it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. Hopefully I'll get a job offer. I think I'd like to work at the place I interned at, but the people I know there said they don't know if they'll be able to hire anybody yet. One thing I like about NI is that they are also in Austin, TX, which is a fairly nice place, and which is a place I'm a little bit familiar with due to my internship there two summers ago.
Other than that interview, I've been working on homework for my classes. Except last Saturday, where I spent way too long playing Dark Cloud. It took me a little while to get past the first level of the first dungeon, since I kept dying, but eventually I made it. It's so nice to have the cat-girl with you, because whenever I hear a bat I just switch to her, shoot it down, and switch back. Before I often died trying to hit the stupid things with my sword. It's a fun game, but the dungeon got a bit repetitive (randomly generating it each time doesn't do much when there's so little to build it from). I can't figure out what you're supposed to do with those mine carts that you find. It seems to tell me that I have to use some item, but I've tried using every item I can think of and nothing at all seems to work. Perhaps I'll try looking it up online sometime.
The most impressive thing about DC for me was actually the intro. The dancing in the cut-scenes is absolutely amazing. They must have motion captured it, because the movements looked really real. At times I forgot that I was watching a computer generated dance, and thought I was just watching people in costumes dancing. Of course, not all of the movements in this game look real. The whole "people gliding across the ground as their feet move at a different speed" thing needs to be fixed.
Tomorrow is my birthday, so I bought myself a DVD burner (a Pioneer DVR-108, for those of you who care). I'll be putting it into my old G4 tower to give it a test run with burning "Kill the Last Geisha" later this evening.
Sunday I have to meet with some people from my technical expression class. We have to give a presentation on Monday. The material is stuff that only one of our group members (not me) knows about, and the other 4 of us will have to do the best we can. I hope I don't fail.
So here's my abbreviated schedule for next week:
Monday: present
Tuesday: midterm
Wednesday: interview with Guidant
Thursday: unofficial pre-interview with Intel
Friday: interview with HP
Wish me luck!
Comments:
Post a Comment
