So far, I've been proud of the consistency I've been able to have, and hope I can keep it up and keep iteratively improving my process. Last week, I said my goals were to:

1. Work on a personal project every day
2. Apply to companies every day
3. Work on building my network everyday
4. Do interview prep everyday
5. Spend time self studying

I will give an update on each one.

Personal Project

I wasn't quite sure what to work on as my first personal project, but when my dad came to me with someone I could work on, it gave me a clear direction. My goal was to build a QuickBooks application that allowed the user to quickly and easily access their billable transactions, as apparently QuickBooks itself doesn't make it easy to do so. Once I had familiarized myself with the QuickBooks API, doing this was a relatively simple task. All I had to do was build a simple backend with Flask that authorized with the user and accessed the data, and a simple HTML frontend that I could use to interact with it. Unsatisfied with the simplicity and lack of depth in what I had built, I decided to go a little bit deeper and add natural language processing. One of the primary reasons for personal projects was to learn, and I thought I could learn more. If you want to read about how I did this, check out my previous job post: https://www.jordanandersongreen.com/building-a-quickbooks-app-with-flask-and-langchain/.

Applying to Companies

My process for finding and applying to companies was pretty routine, although I made slight changes to my process. I found job postings on LinkedIn, which provides a tailored job posting list, read the job posting, looking mainly for:

1. Do I seem like I would be a good fit? (meet most/all of the requirements)
2. Am I interested in the role?

Once I found a good posting, I would apply. Many applications require cover letters, which up until I usually ignored, assuming no one would read it and it was a waste of time. However, in the spirit of optimizing each application, I started adding cover letters to each of my applications when possible. Doing this was hard at first, because I felt like I didn't have much to say, or like I wasn't good enough. It was hard for me to find a way to write a cover letter without feeling like I'm "bullshitting", or like I'm trying to deceive the hiring manager. However, through iteration I am starting to develop a format for writing a cover letter that feels meaningful and genuine. I told myself that it doesn't have to be long, as long as I find something about my skills that aligns with the posting, it is worth writing about.

I track all of my applications in a spreadsheet, and so far the results aren't particularly promising, but it hasn't been too long and I didn't expect a high success rate in this market with just cold applications.

Interview Prep

There are two main focuses I have when it comes to interview prep: Data Structures and Algorithms (which I count as one), and SQL. Leetcode offers a collection of practice problems and courses in both of these, making it easy for me to refine my skills. Every day I first work on DSA, then afterwards work on SQL. I'm hoping that overtime my practice will add up, and by the time I am in an interview I will feel comfortable with the questions they ask me.

Building a Network

Of all of my goals, this one was the one I had the least direction with. My primary method of doing this was finding people I was interested in working at companies of interest, and shoot them a message to see if they wanted to chat. However, doing this led to very few responses. Going forward, I will continue to reach out to people on LinkedIn as I have been doing, but I will want to add on or change my current approach.

Self Study

After completing all of the tasks mentioned above, I didn't always have the energy to work further on self study. For now, I think I will make this section optional, because I think that my other daily routines will more directly help me land a job. Long term, I still want to pursue this goal.

Reflection

A more "meta-goal" of mine has been to change the way I approach productivity. In the past, my approach to work has had minimal structure. While this worked for me, I think I was missing out on value by working this way. Going forward, I will spend time before the start of every week planning and deliberating for what my plan will be. Given this task, the past me would probably carelessly and thoughtlessly put together a half-assed plan, but now I will sit down, spend time, thought, and focus on deliberating and thinking through what it is I am going to do. More broadly, this approach can be applied to any sort of "problem". In the case of my weekly plan, the "problem" is that I want a job. This can also be applied to solving a problem on leetcode. Instead of hopping into the problem with a weak semblance of an idea of how to solve it, I will dedicate time to thinking through how I intend to solve the problem. This approach should only be applied in moderation, because you can't know every single detail of what you are going to do before you do it, and it allows for very little flexibility, I believe move in that directly will boost my productivity and efficiency. Ironically, part of the reason I think this is a new way of thinking for me is the fact that for my whole life, I have been in an academic environment trying to achieve academic goals. Of course, this requires a level of executive functioning, but in school problems are clearly defined, whereas in the real world they are not. Developing this new way of thinking will be an iterative process, and I expect there to be growing pains, but I believe there is value in it.