not quite ready to switch yet and local coverage
This weekend I had really planned on updating the blog in general and more importantly switch everything over to the new address. Then came the plauge. I've been layed up sick since Friday. Well not exactly, I thought I was getting over it on Saturday and ended up spending most of the day with Mike Zucca, who was in the area. By Saturday night, I was green and a wreck. Sunday, I didn't move from the couch. Today, while better, I just havn't made much progress. I just can't seem to string thoughts together right now.
For those who have checked the comments, you may have seen that
Julia mentioned something about a networking article in the
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, our local area newspaper. I knew the article was coming and that I was going be quoted, but this was a lot more than I expected! I'm reproducing it here just in case the archive goes away (and I want to save this!).
Job networking works, when you work it correctly
(February 5, 2006) — Matthew Bernius hit many low points on his way to snagging that coveted job.
It began when Bernius returned to Rochester last summer after graduate school at the University of Chicago. He had just finished a yearlong educational leave from Eastman Kodak Co., and his one-time employer wasn't taking him back.
So he applied for coffee shop jobs, hoping to make some money while he hunted for full-time work.
"I was told I didn't have the right skills to make coffee," recalled Bernius, 31. "I didn't quite know how to react to that, especially after spending the amount of time I did in graduate school."
Still, he persevered, never forgetting the golden rule of job hunting: Network, and use every contact you have to secure that job.
Bernius' networking, for example, touched off a domino effect, as contacts referred him to other contacts. He eventually landed a six-month teaching gig at Rochester Institute of Technology — a job he didn't think he had a chance to get.
It began with his blog. He talked about his job hunt and his hopes of combining the Internet skills he got at Kodak with his new cultural anthropology education.
A friend read the posting, suggesting RIT's Lab for Social Computing. Bernius did research, spotting the name of a "friend of a friend" on the faculty, who later referred him to a professor.
The professor suggested meeting at RIT, prior to a lecture he was to attend there.
Who was leading the lecture? Bernius's former RIT instructor, whom he chatted with, which led to a lunch and eventually a job offer at RIT's School of Print Media.
"I remember him asking me how I felt about teaching," said Bernius, a Long Island native. "It was completely out of left field. Teaching was on my eventual trajectory, but I didn't expect to do it so quickly."
"That's the funny thing about networking," he added. "It tends to be complex."
Networking is a simple process. It's the web of contacts that can be complex.
You just start with friends, family and others you see regularly. Who do they know at your target companies?
Some of the most underappreciated networking sources? Doctors, clergy, haircutters and personal trainers, said Candy Muth, job market consultant at Lee Hecht Harrison's Rochester office.
Such sources talk to lots of people, especially about their personal lives.
Why not shoot them a call? Or at your next appointment, bring up your career transition.
Mention your target jobs, companies and the kinds of people who can help you. They might refer you to such a patient or client.
"Once you tell people you're unemployed, people will want to help you," Muth said.
"One common mistake?" she added. "People handing out their business cards impersonally.
"You really have to treat it like a simple conversation in which you inquire about that person and get on a more personal level," she added. "Then you can ask them to keep you in mind for future opportunities."
Too often people just look for Internet job postings, "or they hit a button and send a resume," added Richard Bayer, chief operating officer of the Five O'Clock Club, a national networking group with 10,000 members.
"But very few people get a job that way."
What if you don't have a good network? Try to at least personally contact the overseeing manager, he added.
Bernius is perhaps the poster boy for using the personal touch to get jobs.
Remember the professor who linked Bernius to the RIT job? He was the same person that networked Bernius into his first job at Kodak.
crazy week
Thanks for the suggestions regarding the previous post. I'm still working out my response plan for tech gone bad.
The lack of posting has been due to a crazy week at RIT and outside. Much of my time has been eaten up with some grading that I was doing for the Database Publishing Course. I've also had a lot of meetings and lectures that I just couldn't miss. Plus, its difficult to justify blogging when I'm still behind on pulling together my application. It's clear that writing the teaching statement will be as much of an exercise in pulling teeth as the thesis was. Grrr... I really need to work on overcoming this writers block. Otherwise there will be bigger problems.
FYI - I've bitten the bullet and decided to switch the blog over to
Wordpress. In theory the switch will go down next week. There may not be too many posts in the interim period.
Oh... and for those who are interested, the current GoogleAd's revenue total is a whopping $0.20. I'm not sure where I'll be spending it all. Though it does give me a slight wry pleasure knowing that the postage for the check will cost them more than the check itself. Not that have anything against Google... I just appreciate the humor in that situation.
weapons of mass destraction
Today, while attending a New Media Perspectives lecture, I discovered that the view from the last row of Webb Auditorium at RIT provides a sobering lesson for the budding teacher. From my vantage point I watched as student after student opted out of the lecture with the help of portable electronics. The student immediately in front of me spent most of his time watching anime episodes on his
video iPod
(just as an aside, I was totally blown away by it and want one). Ahead of him was another student hiding a
Playstation Portable (PSP) behind his notebook (the oldest trick in the book). Around the classroom multiple students were checking e-mail and traversing the web on their laptops. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to cop to doing this once or twice while at the U of C. But I never spent an entire class alternating between playing
Quake III and
Madness Interactive, with an occasional break to watch
Sealab:2021 episodes. A number of others resorted to using their cell phones to txt and play games.
I'm not sure how to react to this or take it into account in planning classes. The knee jerk extremes would be to either ban laptops (which is just plain dumb) or simply pretend that it shouldn't happen (or even worse, won't happen to me). I'm just not quite sure what the middle ground would be. Any thoughts about it?
telling folks about myself
I’ve started the process of pulling together my application packet for the full time position at the School of Print Media. For those not familiar with it, the academic application process differs in a number of ways from that of other jobs. Instead of a resume, I will be submitting my
curriculum vitae (cv), a detailed account of my academic and professional history. I am also expected to submit two statements, essays that present my research interests and teaching philosophy. Each statement shouldn’t go much more than a page.
Right now, I’m deep into planning them out. I’ve been filling pages with notes about my personal beliefs on teaching and research. The latter, research, has been progressing far more smoothly. It hasn’t taken much time to refocus my media anthropology interests on the world of print and new media. Heck, it was pretty much there already; just replace sex-bots with Gutenberg.
The teaching statement on the other hand is vexing me. This is supposed to be a deeply personal document that lays out who I am and what separates my approach from others, not to mention what will make my approach effective. In theory, this would have been developed over a few years of TAing. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury, and I’m a little concerned about that. But trust me, that little detail isn’t going to stop this process. For the moment, I’m reading the wealth of online information about teaching philosophy statements. I think I’ve got the structural formula down. The next step will be to put a first draft together. I’m trying to accomplish that by Friday.
Franklin at 300
Ben Franklin(January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790)
"Tell me and I forget.
Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn."
- B. Franklin
One of the fondest memories from my time as an undergraduate at RIT was being singled out and favorably compared to Ben Franklin during a School of Printing Event. I don't think I was deserving of the honor, but it meant a lot. Franklin and I will be getting to know each other better in the months to come. In the meantime, happy 300th birthday, oh Patron Saint of Printing. Were you alive today, you'd be blogging, and far more eloquently than most out there. Certainly more so than I.
ads and mlk
Week 2 at RIT has kicked off with a slight update to the blog. I'm trying out "
Ads by Google" and man, is it paying off! My understanding is that the google ad system dynamically chooses which ads to run by parsing the existing content of a web page. Because of this dynamic nature, I'm not sure if the same ad will be running by the time that you load this page, gentle reader. Therefore, I want to share what I got when I loaded this page for the first time:
It left me wondering exactly what it was in the previous postings that triggered a "homosexual dating" advert (not that there is anything wrong with that). How and why this happened is interesting to me for both the linguistic and dynamic publishing question it raises. So thats getting added to the list of research subjects to dive into.
Today is MLK day, and that brings up memories of my Social Psychology class at the U of C. The culmination of that class was a group research project I undertook with three other MAPers. The project tested how appearance can affect persuasion. In the experiement, volunteers were asked to read an article and respond to it. There were a number of article permiutations, each tweaked to test a part of our hypothesis. What connects this experiment to MLK day, and to my present surroundings, is that the articles were presented as editorials from the RIT's
Reporter Magazine. The mock editorials addressed whether or not classes should be held on MLK day. We chose the Reporter because like U of C, RIT is a quarter based institution and holds classes on MLK day. There's more about the experiment, including pictures from the study, in
this entry from last year.
