My First Date...

...with the rest of my LIFE. Today was the engineering career fair here at UCLA. I woke up 2 hours early. Got my usual bagel bacon, two orange juices, and tatertots from Ron's House (Rendevous) and went over a few of the big name companies that would be at the fair.

I was really excited; I never get to wear ties. I like ties a lot (now that I know how to tie them). After 30 minutes of figuring out which identical white collared shirt to wear, I finally picked up my 55 freshly printed resumes and left for the fair.

I felt really awesome as I walked down bruin walk in my nice clothes. No one ever double takes at me with shorts and flipflops.

The actual fair was indeed an experience. The atmosphere was intense, yet exciting. After walking a few laps around the grand ball room, I finally found the nerve (and the words) to talk to a recruiter. I started with Boeing. Mmm. At least she took my resume. I don't think it helped that I got her name wrong.. kristina, katrina.. meh pretty close. I blame kcheung.

After going through the other big Electrical Engineer employers: Raytheon, JPL, Northrop.. I stopped by St Jude Medical. They are a medical device provider. And when I told the recruiter that I was an Electrical Engineering major with an option in biology, I saw her eyes widen. (This was a much better reaction than when I told other companies I was EE and Biology). She even smiled as she wrote down on the back of my resume that my senior project was Design of Minimally Invasive Surgical Tools.I kinda messed up at the end when I didn't know what that actually ment, but I'm not even in that class yet, so how am I supposed to know?

I tried going to the Blizzard Entertainment booth, but they were stagnant on hiring non software oriented Electrical Engineers (no matter how much Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft experience you have).

On my way past the entrance I noticed a seemingly innocent girl standing, trying not to get swept away in the madness of the swarms of job hungry engineering undergraduates. I smiled when I noticed that seemingly innocent girl was kristina. For the rest of the fair, the two of us wandered the floors nervously poking into the various booths hoping that someone would have a need for an EE-bio, or a material science major.

At the end of the day, I felt like I really got alot out of this fair:

Two google shades, one book light, one sparkly google pin, and a shiny crystal thing I got from a chinese company to be exact.

p.s, 3M also makes things that are not sticky (i.e, braces). Who knew?