Diary of a Job Seeker #2

(Written on January 9th)

Here are the elements to my job search plan.

1. I will work on a personal project every day that is relevant to the job positions that I am interested in.

2. Find and apply to companies every day.

3. Work on building my network and using it to learn more about companies I am interested in working at, and maybe help me land a job there.

4. Do interview preparation every day.

5. Spend time self studying every day on a topic that I am interested in that is relevant to roles I am looking for.

My goal is to be consistent and structured, which isn't always easy for me.

Personal Project

The classes I took tended to be focused more on theory, with homework assignments being small scale problems. This means that my experience with larger projects that build practical skills used in the industry is lacking. I am hoping that working on personal projects will help me develop my practical skills that I didn't learn in school. I plan on spending at least 2 hours every day on whatever project I am currently working on.

Apply to Companies Every Day

Obviously, I cannot hope to land a job without applying anywhere. The main question for me is how will I find companies I want to apply to, and how many companies should I be applying to every day. While this process will likely evolve throughout my search, for now I am primarily browsing LinkedIn's job board to find open positions. While there are many factors that I look at when researching a position, some of the important ones are: the role, the location, and the minimum qualifications. I am still figuring out the best process of doing research on a prospective application. For now, I have decided to do 5 applications per day, which means I should expect to be spending 1-2 hours per day on applying, assuming each application takes 10-20 minutes (including research on the company).

Interview Prep

While I am not currently in the process of interviewing, I would like to prepare for when I will be. I will start by reading Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, which my dad generously gave to me. From there I will start to flesh out my preparation plan for rigorously, including things such as Leetcode, as coding is a big part of job applications, whether it be in Online Assessments or coding interviews.

Self Study

While I'm interested in ML/AI/Data Science, and would like to pursue a career in these fields, I am currently only really familiar with the basics. In such a fast-evolving space its hard and overwhelming to keep up, but I want to spend time to educate myself. Because of how expansive the field is, it's hard to know where to start, but for now I think I will start by reading Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & TensorFlow, and coding along.