return void;

read the previous part before reading this one, things will make more sense.

so i got to work looking for work. i had my newly fashioned resume and was ready to find a better life. my search was very systematic and efficient. i started by making a list of things that i would like to work on, followed by a list of companies who specialize in those things. i started initially with distributed development. i then moved on to companies i had heard of before. i continued until my list was roughly 50 companies large (give or take).

at that point, i started going down the list and visited every companies employment section. i applied to the positions that i felt i was capable of and that HR would find similarities in my skills with those of the job descriptions. i also used dice.com and the business section in the newspaper to build an even larger list of companies. dice.com proved to be quite a fruitless effort as most postings are made by headhunters.

i went through a few headhunters with no success. most of those positions were for contract work and i wasn’t that willing to be in a similar situation 6 months from now.

by march, i had applied to over 100 positions/companies. my success rate ended up being about 2%. lets just assume the market is very dry for new grads. i had my first interview with General Dynamics for a position in phoenix. i landed that interview through the school’s career counseling. the interview was awful. i ended up blaming one of my professors for my bad grades in this out of body experience where my mind was telling my body to shut up. needless to say, i received no call-back.

later, i landed a phone interview, with HP! it was more of an HR interview but things went VERY well. the next week, i had a technical interview scheduled. after much anticipation, the interview went very well. in fact, i ended up in a conversation with the manager about technology for over half an hour! unfortunately, i did not hear back from the company for a week.

at this point, crystal’s uncle had managed to land me an on-site interview at his company, L-3 Communications. the interview was scheduled for less than a week away. i bought a very nice kenneth cole pin-stripped suit for a very good price ($180). we drove up to dallas to meet with the company. the interview was a grueling 8 hour process, meeting with 3 different functional groups and 9 total people. everything went very well though.

one of the groups i met with did sat-com applications in a windows environment. another did general tools development. the last group that i met with did special systems and was called the “Human-Computer Interface” group. i was the most impressed with the managers i met with in the last group and was excited about doing this development in a linux environment. by time we had gotten back to san antonio, HR had called and wanted to extend me an offer!

here’s were it got tricky. i contacted HP to see if they were still interested in me. they were and wanted to schedule an on-site interview. i had to stall L-3 without looking bad, so i asked if they were able to run my background check before i received the official offer. i was worried about a few things i had done in my past so i didnt want to accept their offer if i was going to be unemployed in a few weeks anyways. they obliged and i told HP that i would love to meet with them.

L-3 stalled for 2 more weeks, and i made sure to abuse the time that i had. i was flown to biose idaho to meet with HP. my main concern about accepting their position was the location. lets just say that boise isn’t a business capital. we flew up there, crystal and i, and enjoyed several days worth of vacation on the $200+ of traveler’s checks that HP gave us. boise was nice, but had a small town feel. there were only 180,000 people living there and it was no more than a 5 minute drive anywhere. the cold was refreshing, but the allergies were not. the mountains were also not as impressive as i had originally expected.

the HP interview went even better than the L-3 interview. half way into the first interview, the guy told me that i clearly didnt need to answer any of his technical questions, so we chatted about some projects i worked on in school. there were fewer interviews here, each lasting longer. i interviewed with a single group, each person being twice my age. the group was fairly small (about 30 people total) and shared work with the systems engineers in CO. i was VERY impressed with the company and the work would be great (distributed development research).

in a matter of 3 days i had my second offer on the table. L-3 was offering me 20% what Secorp was paying me and HP was offering me 40% more than Secorp. Now I had a VERY difficult life decision to make, not only for myself, but for my family as well….