Stories From The Final Interview Trip

Just a few interesting stories from the final interview trip:

The hotel I was staying in was next to several Oracle buildings and at one of the cross walks there was a yellow street sign that had one big penguin next to three little penguins. I tried to take a picture of it with my phone while driving and ended up with a picture of a yellow dot.

I lived it up one morning by ordering my breakfast the previous night. They brought up eggs, hash-browns and a really good croissant as well as four small jars of jelly and a pot of hot water and several tea bags. It was great but with the $20 price tag I figured that the next morning I could actually make my way down stairs to get my croissant.

I was driving along the 101 wondering why people think there is so much traffic in CA and then everyone slowly came to a stop and about 20 minutes later I finally drove by a car stopped in the middle of the road and then noticed one in front of it and then another and another and... - I think that was the first 6 car pile up I have ever seen - luckily it looked like it was just 6 fender-benders in a row.

I was interviewing at Linear and met the director of the group I was interviewing with and he asked where I'm from. I told him Kansas City and he said "oh" just like everyone else seems to, but this time he was suppressed because he is also from there. He asked me which part and when I said Overland Park, he said, oh that figures. Later he explained that he figured because of the schools but I found it funny to be in Sunnyvale and get crap about being a Johnson County boy.

I did a presentation of my thesis work at Exponent as part of the interview. At the end most people seemed to think I had done well but one person kept asking me what about my project was innovative and seemed rather unimpressed. Later when I was interviewing with her she asked if that was my PhD thesis and seemed shocked that it would be - then it all made sense to me and when I told her it was my master's thesis she had one of those - oh, I get it moments and became a lot nicer.

Overall I think the interviews went well and I am very glad to be done interviewing.