Yotsuba Clovers

I’m moving my blog (and website) to www.yotsuba-clovers.org. The blog itself will be accessible at blog.yotsuba-clovers.org.

Awww, those silly undergraduate degrees

I’ve actually been doing some thinking about degrees, now that I’ve graduated and everything. Story of my life – come up with great ideas right after they could have been useful. Blargh.

Since I seem to be giving (or trying to give) a lot of advice about undergraduate direction, I decided to just write up the ideas I have. A good deal of my non-acquaintance friends are still stuck in college for a few years, and won’t get kicked out a semester early for having too many credits for at least a bit longer. … *Cough.*

Three C’s – careers, companies, and cities

In my graduate school Career Management class, they gave region, function, and industry as factors you want to look into to focus your job search into a reasonable number of firms. I’m going to be more specific and say when you think about majors, you should think about career, company, and city, and make a short list of all three, ones that you would definitely choose over randomly generated items. (Careers should also be the smallest list, and cities the largest.) And try to narrow it down as far as possible by logic or by feel – it’s not like they won’t hire you if you cross off their name today. I pinky swear. Promise.

After you have a decently short list, think about organizing the list into similar categories. Think critically. Do your cities fall into a certain region where a certain language is important? What is the common link between these companies? What does this job require of its worker? Etcetera. Do some research, take a few of those useless career tests – they work much better when you’re focused and don’t need them as much, ironically, and stupidly – and talk to people within the industry and function. You might end up adding to the list, but hopefully it’ll still be taking you in a very specific direction that can be applied to everything on there.

Let’s say one of the things you want to do is work for Shiseido (Japanese beauty products company), in their skin products R&D division, in Tokyo. Admittedly, if all three pan out you’re very lucky. (Bastard.) You can probably expect only two, or maybe even just one of the items may pan out. (Sucker.) However, if you were seriously aiming and gearing up for that specific concept the whole time, you’ll know a lot about the cosmetics industry, have a degree that suits you for very specialized lab work in that industry, and know a good deal about Tokyo and at least some Japanese before graduation. And maybe amidst all that research about why you do want to work at Shiseido, you know of competitors or other companies which might be just as nice and where your skills are just as applicable (L’Oreal for example). It might be disappointing not to work for your top-choice, but at that point it’s their loss – you have a highly focused skill set that others would love to have.

If you say you really don’t have at least places, companies, or jobs in mind, I’ll say you’re a terrible liar, to show some nerve, and to use your brain a little for once in your miserable lifetime. Or to go work minimum wage. A few months at McDonald’s will get you motivated to do something, if anything will.

One-size-fits-all-nothing degrees

Another reason to create focus in selecting your major is to avoid majors that lack any focus whatsoever. I have an undergraduate degree in East Asian Languages and Literature, otherwise known as “Japanese Studies.” I heard, “Oh you can do anything with that degree!” so many times during undergrad studies that I actually believed it at face value. Could I? One… Two… Three… …NOT. Wish someone told me beforehand that “anything” in that sentence means “damn near nothing… suck-er, puwahaha!”

Any degree that people say “you can really do anything with that” about – get far away from it, don’t touch it, don’t look at it, don’t think about it unless you want to be unemployed or enter graduate school soon after. And even then I’m pretty sure there are better choices, like degrees with multiple branches that are actually still under the same freaking subject. (Here, I roll my eyes.) As a rule of thumb, I’d personally avoid anything with the word “general” or “studies,” or that can be rephrased as such, and would run screaming from anything with both.

Think about it this way. Would you want to hire anyone that majored in my (dear God, hopefully…) made-up degree of “General Studies?” Wait, what the hell does that even mean? They’d get called into interview just so the recruiter could ask what the hell they were doing at school the whole time. Er, don’t try that tactic.

Niching it up… on purpose

Instead of getting general studied into unemployment, you should concentrate on what you focused on waaaay up there, thinking about what major would provide the most skills and make you the most intelligent and logical choice for the recruiters you want to impress. It might seem backward to say this, but I think the more specific your degree is and the more it caters to a specific role, the more likely it is for you to get hired. There just isn’t an undergraduate degree that employers say “nope… can’t hire, too focused” to, simply because it would be too expensive for schools to do degrees like that. You have to go to the graduate level and waste a lot more money for that sort of stuff like me (lawls!).

If you’re niching on purpose, because you want to be well-qualified for a kind of city, a type of career, and a group of companies, then their recruiters will think you stand out over more generalized applicants. And you’ll know what you want, more than your nincompoop peers, floating around aimlessly. I mean, people go to graduate school to specialize. Why not do it now, retard? I’m paying $1,221 per credit hour here, y’all. It’s stupid. Do in undergrad instead and flaunt it in my face.

For example, Chris is getting a degree in biomedical engineering, I think, a specific outgrowth of typical engineering and typical biological sciences. At the same time, this is a degree with wide appeal; there are still plenty of companies interested in hiring someone with a specific background like that. I’m not sure if it was a conscious decision, considering how much he parties, but I guarantee you he’ll find a job easier in his chosen companies than other engineers or biologists with more generalist backgrounds and get paid more than most of them. I admit they might get more job offers if they’re exceptional within their class, but this is also because they are able to apply to more companies. Remember – you can only take one job offer, and you only need a single good one.

Take classes, not minors

So what about minors? The overachievers among us may want to double major to make yourself more appealing to their choice companies, but screw minors, and screw them hard; the only ones I know of that have any weight whatsoever tend to have the word “business” in them (mostly because I’m at a business school), and even that’s debatable because they tend to have the words “general” and “studies” in them too. A good position at a club looks far better on a resume; it shows more initiative, and the possibility to apply your skills to real-life work.

Instead of minors, just take courses that add relevant skills to your qualifications. You want to learn a language for an international job? Take language classes. You want some programming background? Take programming courses. Don’t take the bloody minor; it’s a waste of time and money, it’s a scheme to leech your cash, and you end up having to deal with crap you’re not interested in. You don’t need to take a bloody “General Asian Studies” minor to “generally study Asia,” and you’ll inevitably run into a class you “have to take to finish the minor” despite hating the content, the professor, or both. Wryyy?

Most importantly, employers won’t give a damn if your degree says you generally studied Asia. They care about what skills you’ve got for them, and I tell you, generally studying Asia gave shit to no one. Write what you go out of those courses you took, instead of useless minor. Take that, useless resume fillers! Fooey!

Starting over – because you can

Anyway, now that you’ve done all this crap and you are going for a Bachelor’s degree in Food and Resource Economics, that’s what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.

Aaaa-hahahahahaha! Good one, huh? I think this is the major problem for people lost on careers, especially in undergrad studies. “What if I don’t like this choice? I’ll just pick a floaty degree! Weee! I like the words ‘general’ and ’studies!’ I also like the word ‘unemployed!’”

All right. You may indeed, despite your best efforts, end up in a place you realize you detest. But what do you think people attend graduate school for? Focusing their career? Psssh, that’s what boring people do.

Graduate school, for those of us silly enough to want to do that much school, is life’s equivalent of New Game +. (I am incredibly proud of myself for making this metaphor, by the way.) Remember the first time you totally owned that freaking Blue Imp with Crono’s 70% crit Rainbow Sword? Kershing! Kashing! 1400 damage, pwnerized! The first time I did that, couldn’t help but stand up and flex my puny white arms, atrophied and pasty from too much video gaming.

Back to the topic… now you can do the real life equivalent. You keep your experience, you keep your qualifications, you keep your powered-up stats and levels, and now you can add a degree that better suits what you think your new interests may be. Masters programs are actually becoming a lot more widespread, as Bachelor degrees have become the new High School Diplomas. (If you want to know why, think about the trend of average intelligence on Facebook from inception till today.) Chances are there is something at a premium brand school that will provide you with an excellent background, regardless of your current one.

After actually entering it myself to meet qualifications for what I want to do, I’ve realized that many people use graduate school it to switch career paths entirely, even – or probably “especially” – at the MBA level. At graduate schools, you re-get access to career resources, are capable of forming new networks, and companies actually come to you on many campuses for career fairs. Lots of schools seek diversity within their graduate ranks, since business and law (is there such a thing?) majors are – zomg! NUWAI - not the only people seeking business and law degrees, and companies like graduate degrees holders with diverse and strong backgrounds, experience, and skills. 50% of the people here at Thunderbird – a business school – have engineering/comp-sci degrees, and I’ll bet they get hired into great companies faster than me, at great positions, despite the fact I spent 5 years learning a new language to one-up all of them. Hey guys! Screw you!

Graduate school is also an eventual destination for many careers – you hit a degree cap, sort of, and have to return to school to qualify yourself for the next advancement. For those people, it’s not a possible investment; it’s pretty much semi-inevitable. Sure, if you love what you do – go ahead! Get even more specialized and qualified for your line of work. You boring fogey. But there’s no rule that says you can use the chance to switch direction instead, if you need to. That’s what the cool people do, I hear.

Stop floating, start walking

Even with all my amazing, genius-level wisdom and advice, there’s probably someone out there that would read this (ha-ha, people reading my blog, ha-ha) and think, “Well, that was shit. Didn’t help a dime. Freaking squinty-eyed Asian bastard.” My response is, first of all, screw you, and secondly, you can’t really tell if you will love or hate something until you step out to see what it’s like; it tends to happen very little just going through regular university life, and even less if you have no direction and sit there dicking around, being emo about your lack thereof (direction, that is, but feel free to misinterpret). That, by the way, was not derived from personal experience. Definitely not.

So stop floating around and pick a direction. Start walking. Change direction if you see a cliff, obviously. But don’t stop. Pretend you’re going somewhere focused. You’ll find yourself not pretending a lot quicker that way and much more likely to get employed.

Why mommy is a democrat

http://littledemocrats.net/

I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING.

This guy is hilarious

Who decides what can and can’t go on a flag anyway? Is there a worldwide flag council overseeing this stuff? Presumably drawings are permitted – the Welsh flag’s got the right idea with that lovely dragon – but what about photographs? If, say, the Dutch decided to replace their boring tricolour with some hardcore pornography, would they still be allowed to hang it outside the UN?Or what about sarcastic flags?

If I was prime minister of Iraq – which I’m not – I’d commission a parody of the Stars and Stripes and insist on using that. Replace the stripes with missile trails and the stars with skulls. And a little cartoon of George Bush pooing into a bucket or something. It wouldn’t cost much and it would make literally everyone in the world laugh out loud. And perhaps all that laughter would bring us all together as one, and we’d spend the rest of the century hugging each other and tumbling around in a great big bed. Or perhaps not.

*Hums the lord of the rings Shire theme.*

Dan + networking = MASSIVE FAILURE

So, I’ve started trying to do this “networking” thing.

Let’s not lie, since I’m going to do enough it of pretending to be interested in you boring people. The first sentence wasn’t a lie, by the way, I actually have started trying talking to people who I don’t know. Amazing, I know.

I’m terrible with meeting new people. I try to go to the Thunderbird Pub every week for a few minutes just to see if anything interesting happens – drunk people can be extremely entertaining – but usually it’s just me, standing there wild-eyed and confused, like a turkey who just wandered into Butterball’s executive board meeting the day before Thanksgiving. “Why am I here?” I ask someone. “What is going on?” I clutch at some random passerby. “You’re not going to eat me, are you?!” I scream at everyone who hasn’t ignored me already. Sometimes I rock back and fort in the corner and make crying noises, too, which is the only thing preventing me from running out, yelping in abject terror.

It’s not that I haven’t tried, really. Once, I tried to be the loud and annoying American on a flight from the US to Taiwan, and despite drawing on all my cultural knowledge of how loud and annoying those damn Americans can be, I failed miserably at holding a conversation for more than 30 seconds. And it was pretty awkward anyway; you know how you try to get the person to talk about themselves sometimes by kind-of asking or hinting that you think they are something (nationality, job, age, etcetera)? Well I got all four of those wrong. Yeah, massive failure.

At least it doesn’t seem to be limited to just me. Asians in general seem to suck at this networking stuff. Actually, that’s wrong; Kale, Hindu god of destruction, pointed out that they’re really good at it when everyone around them has black hair – when I was in Taiwan sometimes I felt like I wasn’t actually spending money but getting a lot of favors, and perhaps because of that I shouldn’t return for a few years – but apparently once we get to the US we all think that we can get places with just merit and ability, and that those count for something in a world where, even if you’re in the 99th percentile and despite what your wonderful mother thinks, retard, you still have 10 million competitors (only real statistics at my blog) that can kick your ass from here to Timbuktu in everything from abacus bowling to zebra riding. Hey! Don’t ask, just accept.

Whether or not it’s a language barrier, or a cultural barrier, this becomes a problem since I want to work in Asia, which means networking with Asians that seem to be completely oblivious to my intent of trying to know them and by extension who they know. For example:

Me: “So you lived in Singapore, huh?” (By the way, I’m trying to get a foot in East Asia’s door, preferably through Singapore, because of INSEAD. SHAMELESS PLUG LOL!, but it is my blog, after all.)
Random networking attempt victim: “Yes! Also in the Philippines, and Pakistan, and the UAE.”
Me: “Wow. (When I meet people that have been to that many countries, I actually am impressed. But regardless:) So… what was Singapore like, huh?”
Victim: “This is my first time in the US, though.”
Me: (Now I’m kinda wondering about his avoidance. Life if he had childhood trauma there or something.) “I’m actually trying to get out the US! And hopefully pursue my career in East Asia.” (See? I’m not totally incompetent. I left it it open for them to ask if they even remotely have a smudge of interest, or at the very least want to fake it.)
Him: “(Goes off on a totally random tangent. Such as:) So did you come here right after graduation?” (Definitely bad childhood experience.)

(By the way, I’m really bloody tired of hearing that, and I’m getting close to decking the next person who asks either that or “Do you speak Mandarin?” in a retarded context. No, I don’t speak Mandarin, I’m just bleedin’ psychic because I just continued the conversation fluently from the random aside you said! We ABCs are all cultureless bastard children of China’s long and ancient and rich and fabulous history of being trodden upon by foreign empires and itself.)

Back to me sucking at networking, as this is my blog, after all. Actually, I’ve been a lot more successful than I thought I would be, and I’ve already made third circle contact – that, okay, hasn’t actually replied yet but I’m close!!! – and it’s a really good contact. (When I say “third circle,” I mean where “first” is people you know, and “second” is people they know, etcetera.) That wasn’t even through Thunderbird’s alumni network, which the CMC talks reverently about as if it were some sort of primeval force that helped create the universe. “Pray to the alumni network and they will help you find a job, auhmmm… but true power comes from within.”

I’ve found out that the easy part is the first and second circles, since you actually have control over this section. The third group is what seems to really count for me in Asia, since it’s sorta, you-know, far away, and you’re more at the mercy of someone’s caring nature and free time at that point. I suppose thus far people haven’t had much of one or the other. (Or both.) I knew I should have tried to grow up sexier. Or in Asia, where everyone apparently knows each other by sheer merit of their telepathic black hair.

In any case, I really hope I can find someone soon who can help me get the proverbial foot in the door, and not accidentally slam it on my foot in the process. Because that’s what it comes down to, right? Forget the niceties, forget the social foxtrot to not say something that will blow your chances. What we’re really asking is how the hell can you help me, and how can I make it seem like I’m totally-blowing-your-mind awesome and probably can help you in return… somehow. Someday. Over the rainbow. Perhaps it’s that last part that is the problem, since everyone knows that these silly fresh-out-of-undergrad babies have no real connections, abilities, or hell, opposable thumbs for that matter. Those damn onions, they’re just societal leeches. Have them level up some and then come back!

Well, I’ll show them. Before I get out of here, I’m going to have the most extensive network of anyone on campus. The alumni network will come to me for contacts! Well, maybe not, but I’ll definitely try to have a much wider spread of connections both inside and outside of Thunderbird. I intend on amazing at least a couple people, and it really annoys me that I didn’t start doing this sooner. Go-go gadget networking, gung-ho, rawr!

…

So, um, what was your name again?

(By the way, whoohoo disclaimer!, I don’t mean to dismiss Chinese culture up there. But, contrary to what some people seem to try convincing themselves, Chinese culture is not amazing because it was a giant impregnable Han dynasty reconnaissance for four millennium. However, it’s a testament to its strength in that it not only survived, but absorbed and remained massively dominant and relatively unchanged to this day regardless of the serious shit that totally went down through those years. Pretty sure no one else repeated that to the same extent. But it wasn’t pretty, oh no.)

www.nobaka.net

I decided to get this domain name for myself later once I figure out what to do with it. The .com one was taken by some squatter so I was like, meh screw it. Watch .net get picked up by someone before I get around to it, too. Then I’ll just have to smash some heads or something. “Violence: like a Sam Adams, always a good decision!” New motto?

Best part is I can be like “dan.nobaka.net,” or for that matter anything.nobaka.net. And it’ll be awesome.

Just in case you’re wondering why I’m still awake, insomnia is easily cured by accounting homework, and now I’m going to sleep.

Best paragraph of the freaking day

Oops, no Global States and Economy notes for 9/24 I guess… ヽ(゜ー゜;)ノ

Read this at the Guardian – one of their humor columns. It was at the bottom; you know, the “about the writer” section.

This week Charlie saw The Bourne Ultimatum: “I got quite excited when the CIA hacked into a journalist’s Guardian email account, because I’ve got one of those so it felt a bit as if I was being personally violated, right there in the cinema, by the Americans. It’s also the loudest film I’ve ever seen.”

Dan’s blog, where another Dan says why bubbles are great for the economy.

I’m trying to get into a habit of reading one book every weekend or so… so far, two weeks in a row, fooo~! (By the way, the other book was trash so I’m not gonna post about it.)

Today I finished Daniel Gross’s Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great For the Economy. Title’s pretty self-explanatory. I hope.

I actually got introduced to the term “bubble” after learning about Japan’s price asset bubble, when land prices got ridiculous (like, 100 times what they are today?) and the land under the imperial palace was supposedly worth more than California at one point. Apparently, although I knew of the Dot-Com bust, what it was didn’t register all through undergraduate studies? Anyway, the book gives an treatment of the unique nature of American bubbles.

While we usually associate bubble with bad, like, “Bad! Bad 15 years of economic recession in Japan! Down! I mean up! Please!” there’s a good argument for why they are good. Many of the bubbles in American history laid the foundations for what came right afterward. Using the Dot-Com bust as my best example, we saw a bunch of companies blow through enormous amounts of cash (billions and billions and billions). And ultimately fail because their business model was retarded and looked something like this:

1. Get a lot of investors.
2. ???
3. Profit!

However, in two years these companies also laid generations of infrastructure that they themselves barely used, but it all allowed the things that followed to be successful. From Google, whose public offering single-handedly made its founders billionaires and whose culture is the envy of everyone and their extended family, to Myspace, the collection of the worst websites in existence, to Youtube, on which everyone with a broadband connection spends far too much time on, the inundating presence of these new generation of internet powers would not be possible without the widespread broadband access and infrastructure that failed businesses built not even 10 years earlier. Gross makes an argument that this is an uniquely American trend for companies and investors to get sucked into an extravagant heyday of laying massive infrastructure, and then end up crashing and burning in spectacular ways. But the same trend causes new blood to spring up upon the same things with better models that never would have been possible without the initial heyday.

Think of it this way: do you think the average user of Myspace would want to wait 5 minutes waiting for whoever he/she is stalking’s page to load? I mean, who would have known something so ugly could take so long to load? Would you want to wait 20 minutes for Youtube videos to load on non-broadband connections? Or, for that matter, any page? Because that’s how long it would have taken without the efforts of these now-dead (or mostly now-dead) internet giants.

Whereas European companies proceeded at a methodical and gradual pace in building their telegraph and railroad networks, US companies raced – literally – each other, trying to see who could build the most extensive and best railroads. Fiber optics were thrown into the ground at an rate at the end of the 90s with the same fervor.

But is this phenomenon uniquely American? Daniel Gross seems to think so. The same mindset Americans have that allows people to invest in terrible ideas at the height of bubbledom also contribute to the spring of ideas afterward. In the end, barely any of the above – telegraph, railroads, and fiber optics – were actually used by those who laid them. Generally, they went kaput from the costs, and were sold to other companies that consolidated the now low prices to build massive empires on top of them. (J.P. Morgan being one for the railroads, in case you didn’t know.) Even more importantly, the demand for this massive capacity created by these infrastructure efforts – bandwidth, if you will – eventually caught up to the capacity itself.

So, many of these ideas end up benefiting many of the people that weren’t even involved. (So if you were a sucker that plunged $70 into Cisco, Gross jokingly says you should feel okay about it because you were doing your part in the economy.) The use of telegraph and railroad wasn’t very integral to the way people ran businesses when they were placing them in place. Within a few decades, though, they were indispensable, just like how the internet is today. And it was cheap because there was so damn much of it! In the Dot-Com bust, we see this all happen at breakneck “internet speed” (I find this term ironic since running around the internet was slow as hell before broadband became widely accessible – in part because of the bust), with the companies involved blowing through their millions or billions in just a few years. But in the same amount of years, the overabundance of bandwidth and infrastructure that we were left with drove prices down for consumers, allowing everyone to access more robust content, and send it out at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time.

Being who I am, I have to ask what will happen in China. We’re seeing stupendous growth in Asia, spearheaded by China and India, and backed by massive funding from foreign investment and the government itself. But if what Gross suggests is true, that the use of bubbles for economic betterment is due to a uniquely American mindset as a whole that does not exist in Chinese firms, then what happens when a China bubble bursts? (And if it is a bubble, it will burst.) Some people think “just” a 1% drop – probably less, really – in China’s 8% growth rate is enough to start the downward spiral.

Who will be caught in the rush? Or more importantly, who will be able to take advantage of the ashes to build a more risk-adverse, stable, and responsible China that continues to utilize the money already invested?

LOL, RAIN.

I woke up from afternoon nap (I think I sleep like 70% of the day on Saturdays normally) and heard thunder. Being as it has never rained while I’ve been here, I was like “whoa it’s raining!” Go outside and see this:

It’s freaking sunny. Look there’s a guy at the pool!

(I mean it’s cloudy, but still.)

Today’s accounting homework was very educational.

I learned that I suck at spreadsheets. (Goes back to fixing half his sum formulas…)

“What the heck! I don’t get it! It’s like I’m not adding some numbers up there or something! Waaaittt a sec… think I’m on to something here…”