hannah: (Default)
hannah ([personal profile] hannah) wrote2014-03-20 11:42 pm

Changed it all.

Unambiguously, we've hit springtime. Even the piles of snow left over from winter will be gone from the Garden by next week - and it's some pretty resilient snow in there. But there are bees out on the flowers, and flowers coming up out of the dirt, and hey, it's the first day of spring. Time to start leaving the window open at night.

(An intense piece of nightmare fuel went around Tumblr earlier this week, and I won't provide a link out of common courtesy. Rather, I'll say living in New York is half the best defense against that sort of thing, because I can't think of anything that can get past everything else around here and still be strong enough to manage to do me harm. The other half is owning teddy bears, and being able to say my room is guarded by bears. Nothing's getting past the bears.)

I very much wanted to post on Tuesday, after a therapy session which had me crying over frustration over the ongoing difficulties with unemployment and networking. Especially networking. It's all the worse when I don't know how much to do, or when, and I'm so used to getting nothing back - I know people are out there on LinkedIn and such, but never hearing anything from anyone leads me to stay away from the whole business as a measure of self-protection. Which I need to get out of the habit of doing. As soon as I see some evidence it's worthwhile.

[personal profile] karalee 2014-03-21 01:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, I don't know if this counts as "evidence" but it's the best I've done so far :)

1) I researched a lot of companies I'd like to work for. A company, let's call it Company X, is at the top of my list. I apply to everything there but don't really get any callbacks. As usual. :P But in any case, I read up on their methodology and stalk their careers page.

2) I see that Company X has a person giving a talk near me (ie, at the NIH campus). I hop on a train to Bethesda and I attend the seminar. Fortunately, it's a good seminar.

3) I also spend the seminar thinking of a question to ask about their platform. Lucky for me, everyone else in the room is only interested in their applications, so I should stand out. At the end of the seminar I went up to speak to the speakers and said "I have some experience in ___, I was wondering if your platform could also be used in that field". We had a good talk about the seminar and went over some cool tech stuff. Then I say "I was asking about ____ because I had an offer to work on that in (the town that they are also in), and I'm very interested in (the field they are in - bioinformatics), and I'll be moving there in the summer."

4) This earned me a business card and a promise to email me. He didn't email me, as I figured, so I had an email prepared to say hi, politely. The day after THAT, I got an email from the head of the group that I want to join, asking for my CV/cover letter. (I panicked, honestly, at this point - it was more progress than I'd expected). I worked for a few days to get a good package together and submitted.

Now I haven't heard back from the guy either way, but it's one more person I know that I can email again six months from now if a new job opens, and also I've become more badass at bioinformatics.

I should admit this was all exhausting and horrifying at the time but after it was done, I'm glad it was done.

(Thanks for not sharing the nightmare fuel. I appreciate it. And I don't want to know. *wanders off to pack*)