Monthly Archive for February, 2008Page 2 of 2

There IS Free Lunch!

Published
by
Hung
on February 5, 2008
in School
. 0 Comments

So one of the things that has surprised me about grad school in comparison to my undergrad is the large amounts of free food being offered every day. I think it has to do with the fact that UNM was a pretty small school and Michigan is a behemoth of schools. I’m always getting emails just from my own school within the U (School of Information) about events with pizza and pop (soda!) included.

There’s almost always free food for me to eat on Thursdays. Fridays are good too. I actually end up spending quite a bit of time planning where my next free meal will come from. For example, there’s a Teach For America thing going on tomorrow at the Union that will have food from Zingerman’s. Thursday there’s a company info session and Friday there’s a panel/session, both of which will offer free food. That’s already like, $20 in food savings for me (if I had eaten out at some place near campus, which would be the most likely scenario)!

At one point I pondered whether I could run an experment: to eat only free food for the entire semester! I decided that I would probably end up starving or getting really weak while begging for food.

I found a site called “Hungry Hungry Coeds” that lists free food events at some select campuses. Luckily it seems that the creators of the site went to Michigan, or at least the main contributor goes here. I’ll be checking it routinely to see if I can maximize my free food intake. Maybe I should also keep a log of all the free food I eat per week. Could end up being another blog…

Internship Status Update: Microsoft (Microhoo?) and Zazzle

Published
by
Hung
on February 2, 2008
in Job
. 0 Comments

Since the last time I wrote about internships, I’ve applied to quite a few places. The two places I’ve heard back from so far are Microsoft (I talked with some people at the Engineering Career Fair) and Zazzle (they replied to my email like, 45 minutes after I sent my resume and cover letter!).

Both companies I “interviewed” with (I got some short informational interviews) were looking for PM types. The PM here is either product or project management. I think they’re pretty similar and the actual job really depends on the context of which company it’s at.

I think the PM stuff differs quite a bit from standard software engineering in that you’re expected to think about the product as a whole rather than the implementation details alone. So that involves stuff like considering the design, the user, how decisions affect both, and tradeoffs that each solution results in. It’s pretty interesting stuff that requires a lot of thought. I’m sort of training myself to think a bit more critically about things than I have in the past.

Anyway, hopefully some more companies will contact me too. I’m still waiting to hear back from Zazzle and Microsoft (which might include Yahoo, who knows? But that possible merger probably won’t happen for a while). Hopefully I can get a better idea of what these jobs entail, and make a decision on what I want to end up doing after I graduate.