Credit: flickr / Jakob E

On the way to Toronto my friend is telling me I need to give up bagels, and I say, there’s enough change in my life right now without introducing more. But that I think it will be better next month. She says, “you always think that; you said that in August, too”.

She’s right. This month’s major source of stress has been the number of talks I’m giving. But – what have I agreed to in the first week of November? Another one. And at a Catholic school too, when I oppose religious schooling. So now I feel stressed and guilty.

Then at ONCWIC, someone gives the advice – track your time, noting that sometimes trying to please, and agreeing to something means that you’re not doing another thing that is actually more important to you.

It’s amazing, you go to these things and you hear the same comments from different people, with different stories behind them, even things you have concluded yourself. And yet – almost every time I am inspired and motivated, and grateful to have heard it again.

The impostor panel at GHC is always one of the most popular, perhaps because it’s so hard to believe that these awesome women, who seem so successful and together, are wracked with doubt the same way we are. Every year (at least!) we need this reminder. I was talking to an amazing colleague who mentioned the panel, and how much she enjoys it every year, saying it gives her hope that she can be that awesome one day – whilst I look at her and think, woah you are so awesome, I will never be as awesome as you.

In the same way that reminder is helpful, so is the one for saying no. It is hard to say no. You want to make people happy. You want to take advantage of opportunities. You don’t want to let people down.

The reminder – if we don’t let other people down, we often do that at the expense of letting down ourselves, and our true priorities.

Meanwhile, for me, a bet I placed a little while ago has proven successful way beyond what I expected. And I feel a little overwhelmed, like, I know I aimed for this but I never thought it would happen and now it’s reality and… I doubt myself. I’m nervous to do it, but also nervous that this opportunity will disappear. Particularly with so much else going on, I feel like I would have liked to clear the way a little, so I could focus on this and only this.

But, it never works out that way, does it? When there’s not much going on I seem to have to seek out my adventures, but when life is chaotic adventures are thrust upon me. All you can do is set your priorities and try hard to stick to them. Work hard, but not so hard that you burn out.

Go and get that same advice again, in the hope that this time you’ll do a little better following it than before.

Rise

Rise (Amazon) is focused on helping you become CEO. As a result I found some of it a bit overly-ambitious for me. But – it contained some really great advice.

1. Ruthless Priorities. You have too much to do, but hey – don’t we all. The trick is to decide what’s critical and do an outstanding job on that, rather than a mediocre job on everything. It’s important to pick the right things to prioritize ruthlessly – the things that make a huge difference.

2. Work smarter, not longer. If your answer is to throw hours at everything, you’ll never scale up.

3. Mentors. This was probably the biggest insight I got from the book, and it made me think “I’ve been doing all these things that will benefit other people, but when did I last make time and prioritize someone mentoring me?” – it motivated me to set a time with one of my mentors and after a fabulous evening of delicious food and horizon-expanding conversation, I left with some key ideas and a contact that will help me move things forward, but more importantly – feeling inspired and energized and ready to go!

Overall, a useful read if you want some strategies and reminders for moving forward on your personal development and crazy goals.

Credit: flickr / velomar72

My friend AY and I were out for dinner, and we got to talking about authenticity, and correspondingly, inauthenticity. It was interesting, because we were talking about how everyone seems to see through people who are fake, and how it ultimately comes back to bite you.

A while ago, I subscribed to this blog, about, being awesome and getting stuff done – personal productivity, you know the type. After a while, I unsubscribed because I was bored by it and found it fake. A while later, the guy pops back up on Twitter with a new blog admitting that he hadn’t believed what he was writing himself (and a fresh start, focusing on stuff he did know). I thought I was just being a grouch – I unsubscribed from a number of such blogs.

I admire AY because she is very authentic. Sometimes too fixated on the future, but always terrifyingly, exhaustingly, authentically, herself. I try and surround myself with people who are authentic because few things bother me more than someone having dubious motivations. It bothers me more when someone conceals than when they outright lie. I’m not entirely sure why this is.

Anyway, it made me think about the first KW Awesome Foundation grant. How we had all these ideas of what we would value, but what struck me – and I think others – about the guy that we ended up funding was that he was so authentic. He had the purest motivations, and they shone through when he spoke.

I’ve been struggling to write something lately, and terrified by my upcoming Ignite talk. But it occurs to me, that what I find most powerful in others is being real, authentic, true. Perhaps that is the best thing I can do myself. Wish me luck!

Credit: flickr / cH@0s

Recently, I was at an event. A colleague was giving a talk, which I’d worked to set up. Someone “important” at the location, who I’ve met, who in fact once signed a thank-you note to me and was, I’m told, part of a (positive) conversation about some of my work days before came down.

I approached and asked if he was coming to our event. He, brusquely, said, “I’m here to thank the speaker”. I said that I was sure our speaker was nearby and went in search of him. We found him, and I was very much not included in the conversation as he gushed about how grateful they were that the speaker had come to give this talk.

I didn’t get a “hello” – let alone a “thank-you”. I was dismissed, and I wondered if he thought I was a student, or a recruiter? Why was I not worth even a modicum of courtesy?

So, this guy was extremely rude and I was pretty disgusted by his behavior. But, it’s not like I haven’t noticed that people assume the guys I work with are engineers, but don’t assume for me. They ask what I “do”. It drives me a little crazy.

I’ve been conscious ever since of sidelining myself. Of setting myself up to be a “token girl” – giving warm fuzzy talks but leaving deep technical talks to a male colleague. Of being an organizer rather than who things are organized around.

Also, I’ve been thinking about clothing. Did he assume I was a student? If I was dressed better, if I was carrying a designer handbag and wearing shoes rather than sneakers… it would have been clear that I was not. But it seems like as a female engineer you can’t win because then geeks will think you’re not one of them. I dress casually to belong, but maybe it’s making me invisible.

So, I’m having a bit of a wardrobe revamp. I bought dark-wash jeans long enough to wear with heels, and tops that are not t-shirts with brands or slogans on them. And I’m being wary of being a “token girl”. But, I’m still a little… concerned. Somewhat disappointed. And, increasingly cynical.

By Maciej Dembiniok (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

The other day, my boyfriend said to me, “One of the things I love about you is that you’re incapable of bullsh*tting. But I think that gets you into trouble, because people who do bullsh*t just assume you must as well.”

This is his explanation for my latest headache. Where I make the argument as clearly as possible, re-read what I’m saying multiple times, send it to a friend to proof, firm that I’m making the argument that 2 + 2 = 4.

And then get a response arguing with me like I’m saying 2 + 2 = 5.

And so I respond saying, no, this is what I’m actually concerned about, this is why you haven’t addressed what I’ve said.

But if someone thinks that the only reason I could possibly object is if I thought 2 + 2 = 5, and persists in thinking that despite my painstakingly constructed arguments, then there comes a point when it’s not worth reasoning with them.

I am, perhaps, excessively paranoid about being reasonable. My question when I’m upset is invariably, is it reasonable for me to be bothered by this? What is a reasonable reaction? My default reaction tends to be no reaction. It’s hide over here, rationalizing things until I have it figured out.

(I know, in some ways I seem really normal for a compsci. In others, well… I’m like this)

Anyway, I just don’t see the point of bullsh*t, drama, mind games and manipulation. It seems extremely inefficient. Why not just ask for what you want, and treat people with respect?

Credit: flickr / Trevor Haldenby (from TEDxWaterloo 2010)

My mind was blown at TEDx Waterloo – the Uncharted – on Thursday. Seriously, it was SO AWESOME. I was extremely excited and it was more awesome than even I had prepared myself for.

Vincent John Vincent (from GestureTek) talked about gesture-based computing. It’s incredible what they’ve been doing and for how long, and made me think about the implications of the Kinect – the start of affordable, gesture based computing.

Michael Nielsen spoke about the Open Science movement. I really loved this talk, because I agree that research, particularly publicly funded research shouldn’t be locked away. It should be as open as possible. We need to have a culture change, where the rewards of publishing a mediocre paper do not exceed the rewards of furthering human knowledge through open initiatives.

Shelley Ambrose spoke about the need to have “curious” conversations, particularly her experience in selling Canada to New Yorkers. Her talk was a reminder that we communicating is more about listening than talking.

Colin Ellard gave an amusing talk about how we come to get lost, and our relationship with space.

Miriah Meyer talked about visualization in biology. I really loved how she talked about taking an engineering approach to visualization.

Shawn Qu spoke about solar power and reusable energy.

Ben Grossman played a hurdy gurdy.

Jean-François Carrey was the youngest Canadian to climb Everest. His dedication to achieving that goal, and the ways he went about it made for a great talk. “I put it on a t-shirt so then I had to do it”, was pretty memorable. But the things he had to say about your support network, and getting people to buy in to your goal were great too.

Abby Sunderland told the story of her around the world attempt. This girl is seriously cool, fixing boats and attempting something that ambitious. The way she spoke about dealing with failing (I’m sure there’s a different perspective on failure when you nearly die), was very down to earth. Rogue waves will hit, and you’ll have to deal with it.

Vicki Keith inspired with her tales of teaching and of setting – and achieving - crazy, audacious, hairy goals. This woman is a legend, I cannot at all comprehend swimming butterfly for 80 kilometers (and over 63 hours). And it all started with an obnoxious ballet teacher and this search for something she could excel at. I love it! The advice about starting being the hardest part, and creating your own reality in which you goal is possible, even if it seems impossible to others, was uplifting.

Roberta Bondar was hilarious. I laughed so much during her talk! But the way she related the change that astronauts find on their return to earth with our ability to respond to change and challenge in other areas was really cool.

Edwin Outwater talked about Rebel music, illustrating his points with a live band on stage. Pretty awesome!

I feel inspired, and invigorated, and really grateful to be living in #wrawesome. So many cool people – not just the speakers, but also the attendees. This is a really amazing place to live!

I’m Cate, I work for Google as a Software Engineer (on mobile Gmail). For fun, I’m a qualified ski instructor and I love to kickbox. I was the Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa, and I do various things around getting more women into CompSci.

I have a BSc from the University of Edinburgh and some portion of a Masters from the University of Ottawa. I’ve taught programming and developed programming curricula in the UK, US, China and Canada. I was also in IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Coming out this year, I have an academic paper, an educational paper, and an industrial paper.

Credit: xkcd

I got hired by Google because I studied really hard and rocked my interviews. It may be different if you come in not as a new grad, but for me my “personal brand” was negligible in getting the job. Stuff that I’d worked on and written about was a conversation starter for two interviewers (one each round) but that was really the extent of it.

Where it made a difference, is after I started. Perhaps because I’m very open about my research and my interests on my blog, I was connected with someone working on an amazing project when I was training in Mountain View, and my first week in Canada it was suggested I move to that project (which I will do at the end of the month). I also connected with someone at Google whose blog I follow (Jenny Blake – she writes Life After College and has a book of the same name coming out – Amazon) which was great, I just pinged her on Twitter and we had coffee. I think because I’ve been writing about women in tech and posting talks that I give etc on my website, that made it easier for me to get involved in outreach stuff.

And, setting up a team-mate on a date via Twitter certainly piqued the interest of my colleagues! So far it’s going well, although I have no plans to set up an online dating service in my 20% time.

Credit: xkcd

I don’t really like the term “personal branding” – for me, I’m really just myself, only on the internet – which allows me to scale in terms of the volume of interactions. I gave a talk to less than 20 people, but it got posted on Geek Feminism which really increased the reach and that was amazing. Being from the UK and having travelled about a bit, Twitter and my blog help me create, build and maintain more remote relationships.

So, I said that my “personal brand” didn’t help me get the job, although to be fair it has resulted in people pinging me with interview offers, which I haven’t taken up. Actually, I think that depends how you look at it. Does the number of results you get when you search for me help? No. But here’s what did:

• Blogging has been tremendously helpful for improving my writing and general communication skills. The guys who started Stack Overflow (Joel on Software/Joel Spolsky and Coding Horror/Jeff Atwood) really think that in order to be a good software engineer you have to be a good writer and I have really come to see their point.
• Writing something also serves to improve my own understanding of it. I wrote up interesting pieces of assignments when I was at school, now I try and write up the books I read.
• I doubt I would have put myself forward for the Holiday Science Lecture at UO if I hadn’t been blogging, which improved my public speaking no end. Thoughts turn into blog posts which turn into talks, and putting all the talks I give on my blog improves the talk itself (more time thinking about it, feedback), and increases it’s reach.
• Doing interesting things makes it easier to have interesting conversations with people. My blog and Twitter have resulted in a number of great experiences. and, having moved to a new city the ease of Twitter for connecting with new people has been really helpful.
• Twitter and my RSS reader makes me better informed – I have not found another medium through which I can get such diverse and timely information.

Some advice for getting started on the “virtual” you

Start

Credit: xkcd

This can seem like the hardest part – and I know because I’m trying to start my internal blog right now and I’m completely overwhelmed by what to write. One think I suggest to people thinking of starting up a blog is to try and write 4-8 things and schedule them – that’s your first month’s content.

Keep going

Credit: xkcd

At first Twitter seems like talking to yourself in public. A blog is worse, because the form is longer! I was getting enough out of it that it was worth writing for myself, but now I have a good amount of subscribers and get comments on about half of my posts. I think the thing is to give yourself a realistic schedule and stick to it. I often schedule blog posts in advance, and at the moment I aim for about two posts a week. I also started using Twitter, and eventually had things to say that required more than 140 characters – that’s when I started blogging.

It’s a conversation

Credit: xkcd

I confess – I am a terrible lurker when it comes to blogs. I love Google reader because it’s so fast and I consume massive amounts of content through it – but I don’t click through enough to comment. When it comes to your blog, no-one knows how much you interact with other people’s, but on Twitter the people who are only in it for self-promotion are really, really obvious.

I actually schedule some of my Twitter feed because I tend to consume large amounts of information in one go and I don’t want it to go out all at once and drown people’s streams. For me, Twitter is 95% trying to share stuff that’s interesting and/or informative, and if someone has a question or something worth commenting on, I’ll respond to it. The other 5% is sharing my own blogposts and asking questions myself.

Don’t dismiss other forms

Credit: xkcd

I pinged Jon Skeet – fellow Googler, C# Evil Genius, and #1 on Stack Overflow to ask him about how he built his personal brand. In large part he’s used forums and question answering sites like Stack Overflow (which did help him get a book deal, as well as a job at Google). For me, blog and Twitter has worked to build my presence and share what I’m interested in, but depending what you’re interested in it’s not necessarily the best format.

Be human

Credit: xkcd

I think we all have those “friends” on Facebook who are constantly posting long angsty moans about their life. It’s a primary reason why I rarely use Facebook. People write long angsty blog posts as well, and on Twitter some people I know (and like) in person share such detail about their life that I’ve actually started to dislike them. I’m going to say what everyone says – don’t share too much, don’t expect other people to be interested in every minute detail of your life. But, don’t be a robot – be a human. I balance the stuff I share with bits of my day that I hope are amusing, often stuff that my teammates say to me, for example on my tea consumption, “is there any blood left in your anti-oxidant stream?”, or after starting two small toaster fires that I’m measuring success in a commits to fires ratio. It’s the same on my blog – I write about failing, because I learn so much from it. And there’s a balance, because I don’t want to come across as some kind of fembot, but nor do I want to moan. But sharing my human failures, for example when I dropped out of grad school, revealed so much warmth and such great advice from my audience.

Advice from other people

@catehstn Think social /personal branding bit like standing in hall of mirrors: so retaining perspective important. Also - work in progress

February 11, 2011 8:17 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@fillenumerique

Rachel Lane

@catehstn @thecodefactory I think of it as being a bit like SEO: get the content right first, i.e. do something genuinely useful.

February 11, 2011 10:46 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonskeet

Jon Skeet

Some General Advice

1. Give Yourself Permission.

Credit: xkcd

Don’t wait for someone to say, “It’s time for you to have a blog. You have something to say” – I mean, I can tell you that right now, but really you have to convince yourself and believe that you can write something worth sharing, first.

I think this applies to everything. Don’t wait for people to tell you what you get to do, go out and make things happen. (And read What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, which is where this advice comes from)

2. Fail.

Credit: xkcd

You will write things that no-one will comment on. You may even write things that no-one reads. It’s demoralizing. What I did, was that I got enough out of writing for me that kept me going when no-one was reading, and it was a shock when people started commenting, and emailing me, and sharing what I’d written on Twitter.

Stop caring that no-one will read what you have to say and write it anyway. Write something stupid, and learn to make a better argument next time. Stop worrying about failing and go ahead and fail – it’s not as bad as you imagine, I promise. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself and succeed, and always you can learn something.

Again, this applies to any number of things. One of the things I love about working at Google is that we embrace failure as a learning experience. We set impossible goals, and fail to reach them – but that’s OK because “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary” (see this post by Don Dodge). I like that, I am always setting myself impossible goals, I don’t think I know how not to do that. And so, I’m always failing. But what that means is that I’m always learning, and making progress little by little on my impossible goals.

3. Don’t Expect to Learn Everything in School.

Credit: xkcd

Unfortunately, most professors aren’t on Twitter and don’t blog. They may not get what you’re doing and they are probably not going to grade you on it. You have to figure it out, mostly by yourself. Find yourself a network of interesting people on Twitter, and find yourself some interesting blogs to read. Interact with the people you find.

Software development moves fast. At the moment, I code mostly in Javascript and do some CSS – neither of these are things I learned in school. To stay current in our field, we have to keep learning and investing time in personal development. You probably won’t learn how to write a great blog in school. But you also probably won’t learn a fraction of what you need to be a great software engineer, either. The best thing you can learn, is how to keep learning, and teaching yourself, and finding resources that help you progress.

@catehstn

http://accidentallyincode.com

Good luck!

Credit: flickr / Intiaz Rahim

I received something in the mail last week, and it made me really happy. It was a copy of What Would Google Do? (Amazon) and a hilarious card from the wonderful Ian at the Code Factory.

It really made me think about how I changed as a person during the two years I spent in Ottawa. I arrived, 23, clueless about what I wanted to do and and what I was capable of. And I left, 25, sure about what I want to do next at least (a start) and so much more confident.

Maggie and I were talking the other day and she said she thought the biggest thing I’d learned in grad school is to make the best of a crappy situation. I went to grad school because I didn’t think I knew enough to join the real world. Fairly rapidly, I realized that grad school was not the place to learn it.

I still feel woefully unprepared for the real world, but, a lot more than I was previously. If I didn’t learn that stuff at grad school, where did I?

From the amazing tech community in Ottawa. Mostly at The Code Factory.

There is this great network of tech people in Ottawa. There are so many people going and doing interesting things. It’s awesome. Yes, there are a lot of government types. Yes, bureaucracy has eaten a lot of souls. Ignore them. They are harmless zombies. The real people are there, making stuff happen, creating cool things, interested and interesting. I did not, for the most part, find them in the university.

So to Ian, thanks for creating a space where people can gather to talk tech and all the other stuff that goes on there. Thanks for generously donating that space to Awesome Ottawa and for helping us get going.

Some other people who’ve inspired me, in no particular order.

Chris Schmitt, of Team Camp – balancing his entrepreneurial spirit with working for The Man. Andrew Ross, of FOSSLC - I really admire Andrew’s enthusiasm, energy, and commitment to Open Source. Kelly Rusk – Kelly is amazing – she knows everyone, is everywhere… doing stuff. ALL THE TIME. She’s also one of the women behind Girl Geek Dinners. Treena Grevatt – Treena is another person who knows everyone! And I so admire her drive and energy in pursuit of the start up thing. Everyone on the board of Awesome Ottawa – and everyone who took the time to put together a proposal. I read and enjoy them all.

Ottawa, I miss you. I miss sushi at my favorite place. I miss my kickboxing club. I miss the pool in my old apartment building. But most of all, I miss that community. Thanks for all the things you taught me. I’ll be thinking of you.

The other day we were talking about what she wants to do with her life, and she has this great stuff that she’s doing with respect to LGBT youth, and I said, “sure, that’s great but will there be a need for that in 20 years?” Honestly I hope there won’t be – I mean, look at how far we’ve come in terms of acceptance as a society.

This led me to talk about how you don’t want to use the Waterfall approach to planning your life – an agile approach is better because 1. we live in times where things are changing fast and 2. I think an agile approach to life planning makes for a more interesting life because you will be able to take advantage of options that don’t even exist now.

This is not to say that AY may not have found her life’s passion. Just that she doesn’t need to make that decision now.

Anyway, let’s break down what the waterfall method is. Basically, it’s the idea that first you identify all the requirements of your project, and then you design it. Only when the design is done do you implement it. Eventually, it’s all implemented and you test it. And this is normally when you discover that either the project has taken so long that it is obsolete, or that it is extremely broken and you go back to fix it. In theory, eventually the project is maintained. The reality is that the majority of software projects are late and/or over budget or fail completely.

The waterfall method is a terrible way to plan a software project, and perhaps a worse way to plan your life. The parallel would be, school is the requirements phase and you would never leave it and join the real world – you’d definitely be over budget then!

Agile is based on iterative or incremental development. Iterations in the scrum process are typically 1-2 weeks, and every day there is a daily stand up where you say what you did yesterday, what you hope to do today, and what roadblocks you have. The parallel in life might be weekly or monthly checkins with your mentor(s).

I’m not saying that big picture is not important, but there is no need – I would say even, no point – planning out your whole life in advance. First up – choosing what you want to spend your whole life on is a huge decision. Choosing what project you’re devoting yourself to for the next 3 months to 1 year is a smaller, and more realistic way to go. A theme, or general direction is more than enough. Identifying places where you might be lacking skills and choosing a path that ensures you build them as you go along allows you to stay flexible.

I am 25 and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. That’s OK! I just try and prepare myself for the new – and even more awesome things – that will become possible as I go. I have a vague, but ambitious theme of world changing. Awesome Ottawa fits into this (more awesome is always better than less awesome), as does CompSci Woman (need more women in tech to code a better world). What skills am I working on right now? Leadership – because it seems like a crucial skill for world changing. Communication – because I need to be able to articulate what I’m doing and why it’s important, and also I must share what I’m learning along the way. Software Engineering – much as industrial research appealed to me I decided that I needed to find a job where I would ship products; I think this is a really important thing to know.

AY’s theme seems to be community building. But themes change and evolve, so we’ll see. Meanwhile at our next mentoring chat I’ll be asking – what did you do since we last spoke? What do you plan to do next? And what’s standing in your way?

Credit: xkcd

Having admitted that I seek out a high level of stress, it’s timely that I have, once again, gone way past the level of stress that I like to operate and hit the “woah this is damaging to my productivity” bit. I wrote before about How to be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind and apparently I should be listening to my own advice.

Or not, because flying right out of my comfort zone is one way to stretch it. Best not dwell on other likely outcomes though.

Over the next two and a half weeks I will:

• Pitch at the Canadian Expo for Extreme Blue
• Pitch at the North American Expo for Extreme Blue
• Spend half a day in Toronto finding out more about GBS (do I want to be a consultant? Answers on a postcard, please)
• Head to Waterloo for my 2nd on-site at Google
• Pitch to guy working on awesome project
• Interest interview with another awesome project
• Leave for a 3 week trip to the UK

In order to get to New York, we’re taking the bus. What’s interesting is the thing I’m most freaking out about right now is not one of the Failure-Is-Not-An-Option items on the list. It’s the thought of 8-10 hours of enforced unproductivity each way. It occurred to me the bus might have power-outlets and wifi and I could use the time to Get Stuff Done. It doesn’t. (The distress this caused me was amusing to my teammates, and then worrying – their plan: get me drunk and/or medicate me. My plan: read The Algorithm Design Manual (Amazon)). The way back was going to be 15 hours on the bus, because we’re coming back via Toronto. I’ve ended up getting off in Toronto instead for this GBS thing, and, unable to bear the thought of 5 hours on the train will fly back to Ottawa after that.

Was the total of 25 hours or so on a bus distressing to me as a European, because my perception of distance is different? I think it’s just – what do you do on a bus? With no power or wifi, clearly not code.

HR Guy: What were you planning on doing?

Me: I was thinking about creating some wordles, but anyway it’s not relevant. The thing is I don’t cope well doing nothing.

He suggested I watch movies and sleep. I think he and I see the world very differently.

So, what is this other than another story as to how I’ve completely over-committed and over-scheduled myself, again?

I have put this huge stress on myself because I really want to have a job lined up for January by the end of September, preferably by the end of August. And I don’t want it to be just any job, I want it to be a great job. And this is a problem because my ideas of what I want to do are somewhat vague – I want to make things! I want them to be pretty! I want to make the world a better place! Programmers can do that, I know it!

IBM is not a place that deals in vague. I was speaking to this awesome woman the other week and she said, “I love PROCESS! That’s why I liked being a software engineer, because I liked the PROCESS!” Last week I saw her again at a lunch and learn – she was talking about how she found a great job at IBM and it was all about how she navigated the process.

I do not deal with the process well. I find it intimidating and overwhelming and confusing. I’m trying to create this mapping between my ideals, goals, priorities and things that will fit into the process. I’m asking for things – which I hate, preferring to operate on the “be awesome and people will notice principle” that has so often failed me and others optimistic enough to use it.

Our MBA is my career coach. He says things like, “When you’re in Toronto you should set up meetings with at least 6 people”, and I make a note that I must speak to multiple people, ask my Toronto-based mentor if she wants to have lunch, and ask more people if they are willing for me to email them my resume.

It’s a start. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile… can I send you my resume?
Cate Huston UK Resume Mod