After a series interviews and preparations, the zero offer result becomes unacceptable at first, but finally it’s a known fact and reasonable outcome to me. The time spent on textbooks, blogs, companies’ research is very valuable which makes me more self-identified, clearer on the career path (which means the pure engineer path is definitely not fit for me).
The patience and attitude of never giving up are two things I learned along the way. The relationship ends, the effort put on interviews with no result never bother me any more, as long as I keep growing up and on the fast way of becoming maturer. I am thinking about trying out more positions later in my life: data scientist, product manager, consultant… It’s really existing that the goal, the dream to think big and be successful lead me a long way. When I try to recall my life in campus: middle school is studying hard for no independent thinking, college life is suffering from the boring theoretical staff and do not dare to try something different, graduate life in Stanford provides more freedom and trying to make more excellent friends and learn more useful and interesting staffs. However, the lack of independent thinking and weak background on communication/physical/language keep me growing with a lot of pain and gradually can not even enjoy the life and the happiness around me. Finally, the time I joined Oracle which is supposed to be a rather relaxed environment makes me think more about myself and get rid of previous shackles around me.
English learning requires a long process, although I have already sensed my great improvement over the time especially the reading and listening part, the level is still far from my expectation in mind to chat or communicate fluently at work. But no worry, I am still young and I am trying to go with the following rules to improve my english skills even faster (but it does not mean I have no patience on this…):
- sing along as many as english songs as possible to practice spoken english. Here singing is both a hobby and an advantage myself
- read more on english, watch more videos/shows on english, listen to more podcasts on english
- talk more during the work. No as a QA engineer, less time is spent on communication, but I still need to spend longer time with indian colleagues(like Varun) to gain more idea about their life/culture and improve my spoken english at the same time. If in future, data scientist/product manager becomes my next carrer, there will be more opportunities then.
- Keep updating blogs like this in English in this personal website more often to practice English writing.
- Vocabulary can also be learned through daily words learning/reciting through Shanbei
- Think in English more and let’s hang out with my dear friends: Lino, Vinod and Sup!
In the near future, I tried to make each blog more structured and I know it’s kind of in a mess of different things currently. I will do the change!
Chen Liang 