Go Borris, you have my support on this! If it happens, we can have it before the Olympic in London! See the letter on My Flickr and read more about this here.

This is the first gov that letter I’m going to respond seriously.

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One week from today, I will be moving down to London, and start my job in Bloomberg. Normally when I moved to another city or country, I tend to have a feeling of starting a new life, but this time is different. Durham will still be an important place for me for the next two years, because Jenn is here, and I will be coming back to see her a lot. So will be a frequent traveler between London and Durham, need to keep my eyes on the price of train ticket from now on, as probably more important than the stock price which I will be dealing daily.

The accommodation is still yet to be confirmed, but most likely I will be sharing a flat with my friend Greg is working in Morgan Stanly now. Although I have expected the price in London will be twice as anywhere in the UK, when I heard from the agent on the price, still shocked. Guess there won’t be much left from my salary after the rent and expense. Well, we shall see!

About the exact day of starting work, if everything goes smoothly, it should be 1st October. In this case, I will have one week to settle down in London and found out some nice sandwich shops near my work place. I consider myself as not a big city person before I lived in Tokyo for a year. But I guess now I will be OK and won’t be defeated by people in the tube during rush hours.

Wish me luck!

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I am in my friend Scott’s place now. Just had a 12 hours slept because I was awake for almost 40 hours yesterday. It was impossible to sleep in the night coach from Durham to London, plus one day intensive interviews and talking with companies in the career forum, plus wearing black suit and running around in London under the temperature of 25C, I was totally exhausted!

So, how was the career forum? Apart from the fact that most of them are really looking for Japanese students who studying in UK, which I was told by a few friends who had been to this event before, there are also quite a few companies are happy to take non-Japanese students.

I had an interviews with a company call Fullcast, it’s a technical hardware design and production company. They are very friendly and one of the presenters there is from Taiwan and we communicated in Mandarin. She studied IT and Japanese in a Australian university and got employed by them, and she said there are a lot of international employees in this company as well. Unfortunately the people they are looking for is major in science subjects, especially for non-Japanese students. I also had interviews with Toshiba and UBS, they were very friendly too and I felt they don’t really care whether you are Japanese or not, but they are looking for talented and hard-working people. The TOSHIBA guy told me I was a bit too early to apply, as I still got one more year before graduate, but it’s always good to think ahead. The UBS interviewers were very lay-back and I was asked a few random questions like “How much money of chocolates do you think English people spend every year?” and “Do you think you ar e a good liar?”. The second one still make some sense because the interviewer was a the manager of sale department, but the first one was totally random and I had to make up a random number. Then he asked how did you get to this number? I answered “randomly guess”!

There were quite a few people got a jobs there, two of my friends were even invited by Bosch to have dinner together. I know one girl got a “nai tei” from Fullcast. “nai tei” literally means “internal confirmation”, which is the company offer you a place and you can start working right after graduate. And another girl went through exams and interview and got employed in the last stage of interviewing with president of company. So basically it’s also a one day interview and there is are possibilities that you could get a job there on the spot.

After all, I think it was good and worth to attend this event. I had interviews with most of the companies there even though they specified “Japanese as native level” in their requirement. It was all about getting experiences and get to know those companies. I had learned a lot yesterday, which I think it’s definitely worth and will be beneficial for further job hunting. As I said, this is eating the first four bowls.

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I am going down to London tomorrow for the London Career Forum 2006. I will be going tomorrow night by night coach and spend two days there. Coming back on Sunday night. It’s going to be quite challenging to take night coach return, but this is the most economic way I can do as a poor student.

This Career Forum thing is held by Japanese companies and those who are looking for Japanese-English bilingual people. Bloomberg, which I had been their recruitment event before, will also be there. As well as some giant companies like Toshiba and UBS. It’s a two days event and I think they will interview people there, so I had been trying to prepare for it, but didn’t get much done :(

It’s time for me to seriously start thinking my future career now. Although there is still one more year to go, but time just goes by while you blink your eyes. Some of my friends had been to this forum and they found companies are more interested in Japanese students in England rather than students who are major in Japanese, they reckon it’s not really worth to go. But I still want to give it a try anyway. There is a story goes like this: One boy is so hungry and ate four bowls of rice, when he started eating the fifth bowls he feels not hungry anymore, so he complained he could just had the fifth bowl instead of wasting the first four bowls of rice. Unfortunately there is not “the fifth bowl” in normal life, there is less likely to have one-shot-to-success, so I need to have my first four bowls – experiences – first!

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Finally got a chance to sit down and write something. I arrived Durham at 2am this morning. After a bit slept I went out again with Andy to solve out some AJS things. And now I am here with my tired body.

Anyway! The Bloomberg thing yesterday didn’t disappoint me. Five of my classmates went as well so we had a Durham group. We thought it was just a presentation and normal Q&A, but they actually prepared more than that.

Start from the beginning. First of all, the building quite impressed me. I didn’t know too much about Bloomberg before I went, just check out their sites and got some general ideas of it. But when I saw the building and went into it, wow, it just likes a professional broadcasting company(well, it is!). We were asked to take photos and given a special ID cards with our photos on it. Then they have their own kitchen (a place for coffee) with all sorts of snack, and they are all FREE! For a bunch of poor students just wondering around in area full of financial companies in London, that meant a lot!

After all the attendees arrived, we were led to a presentation room. Several representatives from different departments gave us short presentations about what they do in their jobs and what’s actually inside Bloomberg. I was surprised when they told us that Bloomberg was a 4 people team 25 years ago and grew to now a 8,000 employees international company. Some also demonstrated their terminal software. The quick customer services respond was new to me, but in financial industry this kind of service is needed.

The presentation was about 40 minutes. Then we were divided into groups of few and started talking (informal interviewing) with different staffs. That section was out of my expectations, but I did learn a lot from those interview questions. In one part, we were asked to sell the person sat next us from what they just introduced themselves, that was good testing for listening and immediate presenting skills.

The whole thing took about 2 hours. That was a good experience and it was my first time to walk into such big and global company and see how it works inside. It motivated me a lot and I really wish I could work in an organisation like that in future. Sorry I could give any photos this time because they didn’t allow photo taking inside the building, but I found a few photos online. There are some on Flickr and a few form a blog. From links there, I found a employee’s blog with some photos. Check them out!

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