Siliceous and Delicious

Weird day. Started by finally reading the paper for lab meeting this afternoon. Then got into a conversation with Jc about the failures of my projects, why they had all failed, and why I wasn’t—as Dave Johnston had apparently commiserated last night—working on a project that was worthy of my intellect. While I was flattered at the compliment, this brought up all sorts of unnecessary feelings of frustration about all the things that haven’t worked out, all the ways in which I feel I’ve been misadvised, dropped, ignored, and just plain unlucky. I went on for way too long about it, but maybe I needed to vent. It’s been an overwhelming few days with the thoughts about life after graduation/job hunting, planning the wedding, and trying to move the wretched thesis along.

Then spent the promised hour researching the companies and organizations represented at the energy & environment jobs fair. Some reasonably interesting companies there—it’s actually kind of surprising to me how many companies seem to be doing something along the line of what Beau’s company does, albeit in a more specialized fashion… Consultants seem to be everywhere. Everywhere. After about an hour, it all started blurring together—sure, here or there a company had a circular job posting that I vaguely felt I might be able to press a square application into, but who the hell knows? Ultimately I still have no idea whether there’s a position for someone with my background and skills at any of these places. And even less of an idea whether I’d enjoy it.

After lunch, headed off to a very surprising careers fair—surprisingly positive. Met some really rather friendly and fun people involved in what seem to be pretty interesting lines of business, particularly the smaller ones. Walked away with a sense of having genuinely enjoyed chatting to people about what their companies do, and feeling tremendously more optimistic about the task of finding a job. I really didn’t expect the conversations to come as easily as they did. I think I’m really a lot better at it than I give myself credit for: there almost always seemed to be an interesting question, a relevant connection or a humorous detail that sprang to mind at the right moment and kept the momentum of each conversation up, the mood light, and the awkward silences at bay. It really helped boost confidence that two of the people I talked to were (very) recent Harvard grads, both of whom had gotten their jobs through this very career fair last year or the year before! With this many contacts made in just an hour and a half (about as much as I had in me before I was well and truly exhausted), I feel quite confident that something good will come my way in the next year and a half!

I feel like I should record my contact details and interactions somewhere, to keep a record of details, impressions, and leads—perhaps this blog is a good a place as any, being that I can search through it by post tags and categories. Memory is already beginning to fade, so here I go:

• I was the very first person through the gates, having arrived about ten minutes before the official start of the event, and so I enquired whether I would be awarded with a lollipop for having won the fair. I was rewarded with some chuckles and a Rolo by Brittany Lin, Manager at PowerAdvocate, as well as a promise that if I mentioned the lollipop she’d remember who I was. Clearly something to follow up on. I, on the other hand, am having trouble remembering much about the company. They sell software and “intelligence” to utility companies, and I seem to remember they had developers who wrote the software, who seemed to be fairly stationary in the Boston office, and then people in “Client Services” (where Brittany works) who travel a lot to the clients and help them implement the software. She seemed to emphasize it was quite a small, entrepreneurial sort of company where she could feed back quite quickly from her experiences with the client to the developers of the next version of the software. She had done an internship at some large, corporate firm (in the financial sector, I think—I can’t remember) and hated the rigid, cubicle-bound experience. She went to PowerAdvocate because she got the sense it was the exact opposite sort of company, and seemed to have found this to be true in her experience thus far. There did seem to be a lot of traveling involved with her, and her sister (who works on the financial side of the company I think) was up late into the night working during crunch time when new products come out (or something—don’t remember the details), but on the whole she seemed satisfied that the “work-life balance” was something the company actually realistically respected, unlike most of her experiences in the corporate world. In the year and a half she’s been there, she’s only worked on the weekends once or twice.
• Next, I spoke Julia Palatine, who works for Apex Green Roofs. The chances of getting a job with these guys are electron-microscopical, as they’re a tiny business and currently only hiring interns and a project manager (someone with construction experience—i.e. Stuart, not me), but what a cool company. They build and maintain green roofs—planting cool shit on top of new buildings, and going around to weed and maintain them. What a cool thing to do. She did say I should send my resume, and that you never know—and I will do that, just because you just never know what may come of it over the course of the next eighteen months. Anyway, I grilled her for a good long while about how their business works, how the roof gardens are built, and how they weather the winters… just because I thought it was really, really cool.
• My next stop was at the booth for Genscape. Sarah Knight—who works in their HR department—gave me a much clearer idea of what it is these guys do (or maybe I was just starting to hit my stride at this point). In any case, they sell information on energy (mostly electrical grid stuff)—capacities, flow, utilization—using all sorts of fancy magnetic sensors and their own software. They are hiring for a few different positions, but the one I talked to Sarah about was as a Power Market Analyst: these guys show up at work at 6, and have about 6 hours of super stressful work—they have to collect and analyze the data from overnight, and prepare a daily report for their clients—that gets sent out a couple of hours later, and then they spend the rest of the morning making calls to their clients to follow up on the reports. Sounds kind of intense, but weirdly interesting. The best part—by 2:30, they get to go home, and on Fridays they’re off well before that. How cool is that?! Their offices are on Huntington Ave in Boston. She also gave me the name of Mark Doolin, a graduate of the Anthropology department at Harvard, just down the hall. An undergrad, admittedly, but at least someone I could talk to who’d have a bit of a sense of where I’m coming from—and a way to start the conversation, at least.
• Next I stopped by the eye-catching display of MaxLite, a company that makes LED lights and is hoping to conquer various sectors of the market with this super-efficient technology. I talked to Charlie Andersen, a really young and enthusiastic guy, who also turned out to be a geology grad from Amherst (so we had both a common background and a common acquaintance, Whitey Hagadorn, to talk about). He seemed pretty jazzed about his job because it’s a fairly small company, and he’s both able to turn his ideas quickly into results, and is both able and called upon to perform a lot of different tasks—not a boring, do-the-same-thing-every-day sort of job. He’s also coming back to Harvard to do an MBA, so he may be a useful contact to have in any case—since the company is located in NJ and probably not the place I’d want to work.
• My last stop was at a company called Harvest Power, who are conveniently based in Waltham, and who turn organic waste into energy and profit (by operating a distributed network of biomass gasification, anaerobic digestion, and composting plants). It’s an interesting business model because it makes something useful out of waste that might otherwise be landfilled, but it also generates profit at both ends of the process—collecting revenue in the form of tipping fees paid by the waste producers at the input, as well as from the sale of the output (energy and compost soil). Again a good connection, Molly Bales, the woman I talked to, was a Harvard undergrad who minored in the EPS department, so again we had some common ground to chat about. There wasn’t too much in the way of direct practical application of her skills on the job, though she mentioned that the “wedge paper” (I assume this one), which she read in a Schrag class, had come up and turned out to be quite handy. She seemed to very much enjoy the job, and gave me the sense that it’s a quickly growing company. When she joined they considered themselves a start-up, which they no longer do; they aim to go public within two years and foresee a lot of growth in the meantime. They’re not hiring for specific positions (beyond internships—yech) at the moment, but she did suggest I send her a resume since these things can change rather quickly. Working in Waltham didn’t sound appealing, but Molly said she loves it—she lives near in Porter near the commuter rail, which drops off at the train station in Waltham just a short walk away from the office, so she’s selling her car as she has no more use for it. Not bad!

As a final hurrah for the week, and very much against my better intuition, I sent an email to the OEB administrator asking to be put on the schedule for Mike Foote’s visit the Tuesday after next. Mike is the Chicago paleobiology heavyweight, and Jerry Mitrovica was (rightly) very impressed by him—and has been urging very firmly that I meet with him while he’s here to try and see if I can impress him into offering me a post-doc in Chicago. Now, a post-doc is of course the last thing I want (and never mind that he might not be in Chicago that much longer since he’s here because OEB is trying to lure him to Harvard), but it can never hurt to make connections, especially when it’s with someone like Mike. He’ll probably think I’m an idiot (I have a good track record in that regard with Chicago folks—Mark Webster basically told me my project and the reasons for doing it were crap when he came through on EHAP, and of course there’s the years of history with Charles… well, Gene Hunt at least was really nice), but whatever. Who cares what he thinks, perhaps he’ll have something helpful to say.