San Diego

Hey I skipped a few years here, so sorry about that, but I live in San Diego now! After about 1 year at Focuscope I came to the conclusion that while I had learned a lot, I wasn't happy in my position or in my general situation in Chicago. It was time for a change, and so armed with my new and improved resume I set out looking for a new job. I made a difficult and exciting choice to apply exclusively to positions outside of the city of Chicago, and really the state of Illinois (although if you've ever been to Illinois, you know that there really isn't much else in the state outside of Chicago).

I stumbled upon a company called TrendSource in an online Classified ad, and after a few months of interviews I found myself living in San Diego, and working for a consumer research company predominantly focusing in mystery shopping and competitive research. While this doesn't have the appeal of new product research that drew me to my first position, the corporate structure and atmosphere is very appealing to me, and I feel like it's a place that I can be happy in the short term and develop into a role I'll be satisfied with in the long term.

See you in 2 years!

Funny Story

So after about 4 months of sending out resumes with little to no response at all, I have now received two offers from 3 interviews I've had in the past 2 weeks. As I mentioned in my last post I was waiting to hear from another job before accepting the Focuscope offer. Well, funny story...I got anxious and accepted the Focuscope position the next day. An hour later I received an offer from Midea for a Marketing Assistant position. I have to make this brief but basically I'm now in compensation negotiations with both of them. I'll be starting Wednesday morning somewhere, but I'm not sure yet. One thing is for sure, though. I won't be cold at either one, and I won't have to carry bags of garbage to the dump. For that, I am grateful. I'll check back in soon.

My First (grown-up) Job

Today I received my first offer for a full time position in my field. Saying it like that makes it sound dry and boring, but I'm pretty excited about it. The offer was from Focuscope, a market research recruiting firm that I've been working for part time in the evenings for the past few months. The story behind me applying to Focuscope in the first place is a good one, but I don't have the time to write it right now.

For the past few months since I began working in the evenings for Focuscope, I've been working a full time job with Hamerman Construction during the daytime. I had never worked 2 jobs simultaneously before this , but now that it's nearly over (1 week until I start at Focuscope if I accept the offer), I'm glad I did it. It was an experience. 3 days a week I worked pretty much straight through from 7am-9pm (1 hour for dinner/shower between jobs), 2 days a week from 7am-4pm, and Saturdays from 9:45am-2pm. It added up to 50+ hours a week plus a lot of commuting. I've gained a lot of respect for people that do this and have done it for most of their lives, especially those that manage to raise a family at the same time. It was tough. I had almost no time to do anything fun, and even when I budgeted my time well I was tired all week and found myself catching up on sleep Sunday morning. I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to work a (almost) 9-5 job now.

I'm waiting to hear back from another job tomorrow before I accept Focuscope's offer, but I can't really see me not choosing Focuscope. I'll try to get a post in soon after I start to give first impressions of the new job.

A personal blog

I was inspired today by Corey M. Cox. A rare occurrence to say the least. Really he was the most recent of a few of my friends who have started personal blogs since graduation, and I just couldn't deal with being the odd man out anymore. It's been nice to be able to look back on my ultimate blog and remember how my last year as an ISU Gnome unfolded. I really wish I had started earlier. So now maybe someday I'll look back on this creation and be grateful that I started it. My guess is that it will lay dormant for at least a few weeks until I really get comfortable with it. That's all for now. I've been reminded of 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost recently and how much I enjoy that poem. I thought about posting the text here, but then I remembered that doing that is really lame, so look it up if you'd like. Later reader(s).