On the days when I work from home, I spend most of the day working upstairs in the bonus room. As many of you read previously, Kelly has gone to a career fair the last couple of days. She said they had given her some cool stuff, but I did not know the half of it. Just now, I wandered down to the kitchen and noticed a bright red water bottle on the kitchen counter that she got from the National Security Agency. She said the CIA was there, too. I will check and see if there is some other stuff and report back.
Month: October 2012
I am truly amazed. Siemens (the big German company) gave away speakers at the NCSU career fair. I saw them when I came in from work last night.
I said to Kelly, “How cool is that?”
She said, “Well they are not that good.”
I let it slide. Then this morning when Christian called me to tell me how he did on his Prob/Stat test (he did great), I asked him about them.
He said, “They are great, you ought to try them out.”
So I did. They are great! I might have only said they were just good, but they are also FREE. They have a paperboard body, but they are perfect for tin-ear guys like me. And they are FREE. I am listening to the Eagles on Pandora right now.
Day 409 of 1000
I received a call from Kelly yesterday right after she entered the Engineering Career Fair at NCSU. She was a little discouraged because there were so many students talking to all of the hundreds of companies looking for employees. They were all in their suits with very impressive resumes and it seemed pretty hard to compete. I told her to have fun–if nothing came out of it, that would be OK. Worst case, the practice of talking about herself in search for a job would help her in the future. She said OK, but still seemed pretty tentative.
I did not hear from her again for another three hours. She got in some lines to talk with Intel, Caterpiller, and some smaller companies. She was positiviely invigorated when she finally called. Lots of people were interested in her resume, there were lots of internship, and it looks like she will be considered by a lot of people. One guy came up and tapped on her shoulder when she was leaving the conference hall and said he noticed she was a statistics major and would she be interested in applying for an internship with their company. He promised her an interview.
Kelly had such a good time, she thought she would give it another shot today. She was all dressed up when she left the house. The very cool part of the whole process was that she has a completely different vision of why she is in school after this fair. She is fired up to get great grades, do an internship, and get on with life in a job.
Day 408 of 1000
Earlier this semester, Kelly received credit for two classes that were up in the air. The first classes was CLEP Biology. The course/test material had to be reviewed to assure the material covered was the same as is required for the NCSU equivalent course. The second was Linear Algebra. We are not sure why that was up in the air because she took it at the community college. Maybe it is because of the course numbers–only MAT 280 at Wake Tech, MAT 405 at NCSU. At any rate, both Kelly and Christian got credit for MAT 405 (the proofs based Linear Algebra class).
She was going to have to go to summer school to be able to graduate on time (Spring 2014) because of both a math and a science sequence requirement. Now that she has both of those classes already complete, she has room in schedule for a summer internship if she can find one. NCSU has a relatively amazing series of career fairs. The two that apply to Kelly are the Engineering Fair which takes place today and tomorrow and the Business Fair which is on October 17.
Last night, I helped Kelly put together a resume. We printed out a couple of dozen copies for her to hand out at the fair. Lorena is going to run her some interview clothes and pick up her backpack. It is all quite exciting.
Christian has already done a summer engineering internship. The place where he worked, Bioptigen offered him a position this summer, too, but he needs to take one or two classes this summer, so he can graduate in Spring 2014. He will be able to work on his undergraduate research project this summer. It is very interesting and will help him build up his resume for grad school. Hopefully he will be able to get another intership between his undergraduate degree and the start of grad school.
Day 407 of 1000
I spend about one-fourth of my time on the road these days. The rest of the time, I spend at home, working up in the bonus room. It used to be that I went off to work every morning while the rest of the family stayed home. Now it is often the other way around. Today, Lorena will be in school until about five so I will pick up the kids at NCSU when they get out a little after mid-day.
All this has me thinking about what will happen to the kids when they leave home in a little over a year and a half. It might move out to a little more than that if the kids stay home for the summer, but it will be soon. One of the big topics in our household over the years has been that the purpose of school is to learn something that will make you employable, get out as quickly as possible, and if you have a little fun a long that is OK, but not essential.
Having done the homeschool thing, one of our pet peeves is the idea that the experience of traditional school has any intrinsic value other than the preparation of the students to contribute to society. We have given this a good deal of thought and discussion over the last several months because the kids are really not to far from the transition from college into either grad school and/or work when they will have to take even more responsibility for their finances, household, and all the things that have to do with living on their own. Some of the topics include internships, leisure time (or, more importantly, the lack thereof when it comes to meeting responsibilities), and resumes.