Playing the Job Game

Ok, I know Dan was ranting a bit about being a BME, and how nobody wanted to hire him. Here are my thoughts on why we all (I mean BMEs, because we all, even me, do this) need to stop whining a little bit:

1) So you say that you put on your resume that you had a Biomedical Engineering Degree, with a concentration in Tissue Engineering? And you wonder why you have a problem getting 'normal' BME jobs? Remember that there are almost always 2 types of people reading your resume a) HR people who know minimally what BME really is or 2) worse, a computer that scans your resume. Think about it: if you were and HR person and worked for a TV repair shop, would you hire the person who had the major "Electronics Repair: Refrigerators" or simply "Electronics Repair"? Don't put something that may look impressive, but screams "I don't fit!" So you say that you feel bad about purposefully omitting a fact that doesn't appear on your transcript? Ok, so put the amount of credits you took, or the number of classes. Maybe WE all know that we had a broad major, but how many other people know that? I've had friends at other schools where the BME major was considered even easier than Applied Physics!

2) The economy sucks and no one s getting hired. We all have jobs now anyways. That is really impressive. And good jobs. I worked with at least 10 people this summer who were in my boat of not having a job so they may as well have free housing and free food and unlimited credit card use (summer IBC is the most amazing thing ever). I was the ONLY person with a job at the end of the summer. And these weren't all like Philosophy majors. And these were also people who had previous internships that "almost guaranteed" them an eventual offer, but the offer just didn't happen.

3) Dan's PI said to him and me, "I was shocked how many people applied to your position. I even interviewed other people.' This job market must really be bad if I received that many applications for a simple full-time lab tech job." Dan was the top choice out of all of these people. People who have graduated college and need a job. A job posted in September July.

4) I know this is true at least for me, but being a BME major has taught me more about what I don't want to do than I think any other major could have. I would have loved being a psych major or an ecology major, but I wouldn't have known really the real science world. I know for a fact that I hate Tissue Engineering. I cannot express this enough. I used to joke that Hung's class was to me like memorizing a Dr. Seuss book: when you put the wigwams thought the hypergigawatt device, they get flimflamed! Oh man, I am thankful that class wasn't interesting, because I may have pretended I actually cared and then made very poor career choices.

5) Telling people you were a BME major still impresses people. I made Dan's PI and the PI next door jolt a little when I told them I was a BME major, even after hiring Dan and knowing he was one. Being a really smart girl still gives me great joy in surprising other people.

Ok, so in conclusion, BME wasn't a sucky major. It's just a sucky economy. And so what if I had bad grades. I still impress people ;o)

Job details - Dan

Looking for jobs is not a terribly fun process, especially since you're essentially bleeding money without any replenishing supply while you're doing it. Now that I've found a job, I figure I should write a little bit about what the job actually is, and how I feel about it.

First, a story: my job search unofficially started in late December, before really picking up at first in February, and then again in March and April, and then really picking up in June and July. I'd draw a nice little graph to illustrate my point, but it's nearly 1am and I don't particularly feel like wrestling with any photo, illustration, or similar image-creation program. Not even MSPaint. If starting the search were assigned a numerical value, let's give it the value 1 to provide a baseline. The intensity of the search kicked up to level 3 in February, and then up to levels 5 and 7 in March and April, respectively. Similarly these levels increased to 12 and 15 in June and July, to give you some sort of comparison.

Part of the difficulty I had was that having a Bachelor's in Biomedical Engineering, specifically Tissue Enigneering, with professional experience in genetics and cancer/immunology, and extracurricular commitments to student council, doesn't seem to really provide much in terms of qualifications for many jobs. A good number of government agencies (mostly in the Armed Forces) and even private companies, are looking for engineers. Government agencies want every type of engineer and scientist except for biomedical engineers, and private companies want engineers to run their computers and their infrastructure, as well as biology or biomedical engineering majors with a Ph.D. and/or over a decade of experience. A bachelor's with two years of experience doens't quite fit the bill. Maybe it's the economy, but it also just seems like very few people outside of academia do biomedical tissue engineering. It really does seem that employers see me as a highly qualified candidate, qualified to do anything, everything, and nothing all at the same time.

That said, my new job is a Research Assistant position in a virology lab in the Cancer and Immunology Department at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the lab is the investigation of the pathway that Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) uses. HCMV is responsible for a large number of birth defects in children, including deafness and mental retardation. The virus has serious effects on newborns, but largely only mild effects on adults. The effect on newborns is of particular interest not because adults show few or no symptoms, but rather, because this is research being done at a Children's Hospital.

All seriousness aside, the work being done in this lab is so cool. The PI is really nice, and reportedly works people really hard, but is fair about it. Honestly, I'm glad for this -- I think I might get bored otherwise. The grad students in the lab seem awesome as well, and we all live in Virginia, within about 5-10 miles of each other, with maybe two exceptions. Quite the coincidence.

The pay isn't great, but I was never expecting to find a job that would have stellar pay, especially given the current economic climate. I was always looking for a job I would learn a lot from, pay enough to cover basic costs, and, really, provide health insurance. Anything beyond that is a bonus. I didn't take this job for the money; I'm taking this job becuase the people are great, the work is impressive on so many levels, and everything about this is stimulating. Once everything is settled and I'm set up in the lab a few months from now, I'll likely start volunteering in the hospital after work one or two evenings a week to get some clinical experience.

In short, I haven't even started work yet and I already love the job. Now to get all my Bio and Biostat books sent from home so I can brush up on that material...

Our neighborhood!

The map below is a Google Map aerial view of the DC Metro area, and our neighborhood in Alexandria. I originally created the map to help with the apartment search, but now that we're done, I've removed the markers for the other apartments, and I'll be adding markers for grocery stores and the like. (Click the "View Larger Map" link to get a panel with a complete listing and description of the various markers.)

If you take a closer look, the green "arrow and star" marker is our apartment complex, though the aerial photograph is maybe four or five years old and still shows it as a construction site. The two large gray structures are the two parking garages, which were apparently built first.

Slightly northeast of that, about a block away, is the US Patent & Trademark Office campus. The entire construction site south of Jamieson Ave, east of Elizabeth Ln, west of John Carlyle Ave, and north of Eisenhower Ave, is the current USPTO campus, and is fully developed, except for a new private development going up in the area. Again, the aerial photographs are quite out of date. Given that Pam's commute will clearly be rather short, compare that to my commute, which is actually pretty fast at about 60 minutes door-to-door. Actual time spent on the train is maybe 30-45 minutes, 5-10 minutes walking on either side, and a 5-10 minute shuttle ride from the Brookland-CUA Metro station to the Children's National Medical Center. Anything less than an hour and a half each way to my grandmother's house in Queens on the NYC subway in the middle of the summer is amazing to me.

I've also plotted the path of the DC Metrorail system (pretty accurate for the at- or above-ground segments, best guess for underground) and most of the stations on the portions of the lines I'll likely use.


View Larger Map

I'll add more markers to the map as we discover more in the neighborhood.

New projects!

I've wanted to play around with website development for quite some time now -- I originally started by building a website for my high school newspaper -- but never had enough time and/or money to do so. Often, these shortages would alternate, though most of the time, I would experience shortages of both simultaneously.

Anyway, this morning, I finally sat down and did some research on my own to try and find cheap ways of sustaining this little hobby. I needed a web host, and domain name registration.

Domain name registration has always been pretty cheap, anywhere from $2/yr upward, but typically $8-15/yr, depending on the type of domain, etc. No big deal there.

Hosting, on the other hand, was usually rather expensive, though prices have fallen rather dramatically over the past few years. So much so, in fact, that I managed to find several web hosts offering the type of support I've been looking for, PHP4 /PHP5 as well as Ruby on Rails, for a price that was reasonable, e.g. $5-10/mo. Some even threw in a free domain registration or two.

Having found a decent price for hosting which included a free domain with a 1-year commitment, and a sale on *.info domains, I now have a webhost and the domains danielsenhwong.com and fundingatcolumbiauniversity.info!

* I registered fundingatcolumbiauniversity.info so that i could fulfill a promise to help develop a new Joint Co-sponsorship Application.

New Ratties!

So Dan's posts are all about business. Of course, this is not for me.

Pause for a minute in utter disbelief at the fact that Dan has labeled a glass of water with a Post-It. . "H2O." Why? Quote, "So I know this is the water glass."

Ok, so now that is mentioned, I wanted to put pictures of our rats! We got 2 at first, Costa and Val (as in Vallancourt to those who know), and then we realized our tank was big enough for a 3rd, so we got Lu. Costa's a hooded rat, and Lu's a Berkshire, and Val is some sort of Irish/Berkshire mix. Yes, there are breeds of rats. In fact, European and American cultures are in the minority in thinking that rats are disgusting. In fact, most other cultures just see them as animals, the way you'd see a lizard in your house.


More later! Here's a picture of Val and Costa.

Double your pleasure, double your fun

So I've invited Pam to start writing items for this blog. I might change the name and URL once she decides she actually wants to, which seems like it might be soon.

In other news, our apartment complex has a half-court basketball court and full tennis court on top of the parking garage attached to our building, and Pam and I went up there today with our new sports equipment. Turns out I'm not as bad at basketball as I thought I was, though that's not saying too much. I also "played" tennis for the first time ever.

The Header Image Story

The "A7" image in the header for this blog is a picture I took of an airport gate sign at Seattle's Sea-Tac airport over four years ago when I first left Seattle for New York. I say over four years ago because I left in late June and spent two months living with my Grandmother and working at my Uncle's cell phone store in Queens (Elmhurst, on Broadway, if you're curious).

This picture, in its full form, has been my desktop background on and off for the past few years. I think Sumeet saw it when he visited me in Seattle, and took a similar picture of his own at the airport on the way home.

First Post: A Recap

It has been three months and four days since Commencement, and likely longer since the last time I had a long conversation with most of you. The following is a list of things that have happened in that time, in roughly chronological order:

• Senior Design, +10 days after Commencement
• Questioned choice of major (recurring event, bi-weekly [both definitions of the term])
  
• Applied for jobs in the Seattle and New York area
• Experimented with Ubuntu Linux, home network file server idea
• Senior Design with Second Place in category in RERC-AMI National Design Competition
• Sumeet visits Seattle
  
• Visited New York before everyone started work/internships
• Applied for more jobs in Seattle and New York
• Pam gets an interview with the USPTO
  
• Applied for jobs in Boston, Washington, DC, and the Bay Area
• Pam gets a job with the USPTO
• Applied for more jobs in Washington, DC
• Moved to Alexandria, VA via NYC (long, long story)
• First employer contacts me regarding a position for which I have applied
• Interview with said employer, Children's National Medical Center
  
• Job offer!

I'll likely write a post for each large story in there, but if there's one that people are particularly interested in, I'll try to write about that first.