Mike Oren.com

I managed to land interviews with IBM for an HCI Engineer internship and Garmin for a software engineer internship after heading over to Iowa State's career fair this past week. When I approached Garmin at the career fair and asked them about positions they had in usability, user experience, etc. they seemed interested but were unaware of any positions at that time so I had assumed nothing would come of it. However, the next day I received an e-mail from the interviewer asking me to sign up for an interview, so I'm hoping they found a position that involves some user experience work.

Actually my experience with the IBM recruiter was somewhat similar. When I was speaking to the recruiter about HCI/user experience positions she didn't really know of any but invited me to apply to IBM research, which has a different recruitment process. However, since I'm not presently pursuing a PhD I assumed that my chances of getting an internship with the research division were slim. Thus, I chose to pursue the matter further, especially since a few days earlier I had applied for a user experience internship with the main arm of IBM so I knew the position existed. After informing the recruiter of this she spoke with another recruiter and I had my interview. Goes to show that prior research into positions at a company and a little persistence pays off. I did go to the IBM research site later though and looked up their internship opportunities and it turned out that they had nothing listed for user experience. Returning to the standard IBM site though, I found two additional HCI positions that I had either missed or had been posted since my last visit and a position doing accessibility work.

So I'm excited about the interviews and have been working on preparing for them so I can make the best possible impression, especially since an internship I do now may lead to a job offer after I graduate with my Masters (assuming I don't decide to go on for a PhD). I've also recently had the good fortune of having one of my blog posts linked to by InformationDesign.org. That gets my name out there more, which I always like. My latest entry to that blog is on user experience research budgets, so feel free to check it out.

On Friday I'll be finding out if CHI '07 accepted my abstract. I'm hoping they did since I really want to get out there and find out what research others are doing, but without the funding I get from having something to present there I won't be able to make it.

On a final note: go Bears!

Update: Some good news happened yesterday that I didn't feel justified a full new post (since I had just written a post yesterday--Saturday): I won an iPod Shuffle from DealsPl.us! This makes the 3rd MP3 player I've won in roughly a years time (the first 2 were the ones I won from Samsung's Hope For Education Contest in 2005 (although I didn't get the prize until 2006). DealsPl.us has been a great source of freebies for me in the past few months I've been checking it out--through it I found out about the free Senseo program, free copy of Office 2007 Pro (which just came in yesterday), and many other freebies. I also used it to find out about when Target was getting a shipment of Wiis (since somebody posted about it) and managed to get my Wii by following that lead. So I highly recommend joining and entering some of the future contests they'll have--and DEFINITELY check out the freebies section. This, of course, also follows my casino winnings in December (turned $20 into $126 when we were at the casino for my sister's 21st birthday--I forgot to mention that in earlier updates). So I appear to be on a lucky streak. Hopefully that luck will carry over to getting into CHI '07 and getting a nice internship.

Also, please give me feedback on this new logo I'm trying out:

posted by Mike Oren  # 8:02 AM