Day of Trials

Today was a day of trials.

In preparation for today's interview, Saori and I stayed up late last night, tweaking portfolios, ironing our shirts, and practicing our interview questions. We asked each other a lot of really hard questions such as, "what are your strengths as a designer?" and "why do you want to work at Luxmark? [made up firm name]"

I got up at 8, dressed in a suit I had last worn to a funeral, put on the nice tie and shoes, and headed out to school. At studio, I printed out a new portfolio on nice paper, trimmed it, stapled it, and headed over to the career center in the student union where our interviews with Luxmark were scheduled. 

I had an interview scheduled with Constant [also not his real name] who was one of the principals of this 1000 person firm, who apparently wanted to talk to me personally after seeing my work samples I submitted.

It was my first real job interview, actually so I was a little nervous, but I felt prepared and I knew what my strengths as a designer were and I had a few questions ready, and I was actually quite curious to see how my portfolio would be received. It was a win-win situation for me regardless, unless I totally screwed up the interview early on.

I think the interview went pretty well, actually. Constant was very nice, very talkative, and our conversation naturally drifted between my portfolio and the works in it, work the firm had done, what they were looking for, etc. It was much more of a conversation, and much less of a grilling I was expecting. At the end of the interview, which was about thirty minutes long, Constant said that once had seen my work he was struck by the fact that I was approaching architecture differently than other people's portfolio's he'd seen, and that he was very impressed with the work. It was very gratifying to hear this from a principal from a major architecture company.

Did I get the internship? I don't really know. My gut instinct is that they're primarily scouting for future potential, and that while I might have impressed, they may or may not have a position for which I'm ideal.

Anyway, it was a great experience for interviewing. Saori also interviewed with them, and we'll probably hear back from them within a few days/a week I'd imagine.

After our interviews and changing into regular clothes after shedding our suits, I drove over to my friend Hiep's apartment to take him to a driving test. He'd taken it the day before in his roommates car, but failed it. His roommate, Dew, had patiently explained all the tips and tricks to passing, but was exasperated when he found out Hiep had failed. "You never told me about the speed limit!" Hiep replied. Since Dew took off yesterday to see his sister, I volunteered my Prius.

It was a trial getting to the place. Hiep thought I knew where it was, and he didn't really remember how to get there, so we drove halfway to the city one before he realized it was the wrong one, and then we played iphone research as he attempted to figure out where the hell this place was while I battled rush hour traffic. "Oh shit," Heip said, as he worked the iPhone, "the last test is at 4:30". I glanced at the clock on the dash- 4:05. It wouldn't have been so bad if either one of us had any idea of where this place was.

We did find it eventually, and with enough time remaining for Hiep to make a practice parallel park and turning the car on, off, parking, etc. (there are few different things about driving a Prius). Anyway, he did pass the test this time. ("I drove twenty miles an hour! So hard!") so that was good, as he really needs to get his license before taking his parents on a cross country trip and renting a car etc. And he's on a student visa, so he's been jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops lately.

Saori needed to drop some stuff off at school, so I tagged along in the early eavning. I was just going to stay in the car, but Saori ran back, laughing, saying that there was David, beer, and popcorn inside. The Year End Show for the architecture school is going on, which is basically an exhibition of all the graduating masters and undergrads's work. This was the 'soft opening' which involved beer and popcorn. The popcorn came from a forlorn looking rental circus popcorn popper. The beer was Shlafly Hefe from a keg, tapped by an equally forlorn looking friend of ours, David. Forlorn, because there was nobody else there. "It's not terrible," he said, "so far, I've had seven boxes of this popcorn and four cups of beer." So we sat down and chatted for awhile over free beer and popcorn before we wandered around to check out the year end show exhibits, which were hung in Steinberg like white paper coffins.

Then, when we got home, we went for a run. We're starting slow for Saori- 1 minute running followed by 2 minutes of walking, alternating for 30 minutes, but that's just the first week and it gets more rigorous from there. After our joint workout, I ran my own session for 30 minutes. (1 minute of running followed by 0 minutes of walking, alternating for 30 minutes).

Whew!