While searching for jobs in the fall, china was nowhere to be found of my list of goals. I had never been to the country, to anywhere in Mainland Asia for that matter, and knew even less about the people, language, culture etc. I had taken Japanese for three years in high school, but at that point had been more interested in the boy sitting in front of me that the squiggly lines on the page in front of me. suffice to say, I did not emerge from that class with a grasp of the Japanese language, and even if I had, Chinese is a whole different story, although still using squiggly lines.
So how did I come to be in the situation that I am in now, moving to Beijing in a month? During the fall of senior year at CMC, everyone rushes around frantically submitting resumes and dry cleaning suits in the hope that they will be chosen by some consulting or investment banking firm to be a number cruncher for a few years. the vast majority of graduates leave with jobs at the end of the year, and it is something of an embarrassment as an economics of finance major if you have not secured a job by winter break, let alone graduation. As it was a quite nerdy school, interviews, offers, resumes and the like were great topics of conversation at parties; the usual who hooked up with who got replaced by who got interviews and offers from who. It was not unusual to see two highly drunk people contemplating the merits for their different offers from investment banking firms, much to the chagrin of the liturature major next to them, who had yet to get a job. Moral of the story: get a job or feel like a loser.
Anyway... after a night of resume dropping on monstertrak, I saw one last posting that looked interesting (the job was in China and I wanted to work abroad), and so although speaking chinese was one of the requirements for the job I figured I might as well apply for shits and giggles and wrote a great cover letter about how my knowledge of japanese (nonexistant) would surely help me learn chinese fast enough to work at the company. I completely forgot about the application and was astonished when a week later I heard that I had gotten a first round interview. Parties at CMC start Thursday night at approximately what time your last class ends, and as the phone interview was not till 9 I was going to be far behind everyone else. my brilliant idea to fix this was that because I thought I had no hope of getting the job since it required Chinese, I would simply start drinking before the phone interview as they could not see the bottle in my hand.
Amazingly enough, I interview very well while drunk and so I got second round interviews. This drinking while interviewing continued all the way until my interview with the partners, because at that point I realized there might be a slim chance I would get the job. After that it gets boring, no more drinking and interviewing, so I'll move on. Just making the point that I have no idea how I got this job since I: I drank during the interviews, do not speak mandarin, and do not know very much about technology which I would assume to be paramount at an IT consulting firm. I accepted the job which let me leave the ranks of stressed-out-and-insufficient-feeling-people-without-jobs, and started to learn Chinese, which is not as fun as the squiggly lines you draw in preschool amazingly enough.
This blog is going to be about anything crazy or fun that happens in china. If I hate it, then I will rant in here, if my apartment mates (three Chinese guys) are ridiculous I will write stories about them in here, if I accidentally eat a dog I will write about it, if I get eaten by an aardvark in Australia I will not write about it since I will be dead, but hopefully that will not happen, although Australia has the highest number of poisonous animals per person, fun fact!
ciao
Posts
