Fall Has Arrived

It's 50 degrees F, it's raining, and leaves are strewn along the ground. Fall has definitively arrived and I think my days of beach volleyball here in Lausanne are numbered. Good thing I have a trip to Houston, where the beach volleyball season extends from March to December, coming up in a week!

Speaking of Houston, it seems that all of my friends there made it through Ike OK. The power is still out but everyone is safe.

Last week my ICP team presented our results from Phase II to our client in Zurich. Thanks largely to the efforts of Daniel, my German teammate who pulled triple duty as programmer/analyst, slide czar, and presenter, we turned out a quality product. Our client agreed that our project could help them add over CHF 100m to their bottom line! We are very excited about phases III and IV, which commence in two weeks.

First, however, we have a two-week deluge of recruiting activities. It begins tomorrow with a career fair at IMD then continues with multiple rounds of interviews over the next two weeks. I have an interview tomorrow with MTS Group, an Italian heating company that is concentrating heavily on solar thermal, and I hope to get interviews with GE Energy and Amazon at the fair. Tuesday I interview with Shell and Thursday with British Telecom. Should I succeed in the BT interview, there will be another on Friday, giving me just enough time to make it to Paris for the Jimmy Buffett concert. If Shell likes me, there will be another interview the following week--when I'm scheduled to be in Houston. I suppose we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it. I may also have an interview with Google this week but that is still to be confirmed.

This weekend I am spending my time researching the companies with which I have interviews and making sure I have a coherent story about the fit that I see with them. As much as I like to think of myself as a good ad hoc speaker, I'm definitely much better when I am prepared. In the meantime I'm also sitting on 10 companies to which I need to begin marketing myself and over 200 companies that I haven't yet vetted enough to know whether or not they are worth pursuit.

You'd think finding the right opportunity to help change the world wouldn't be this complicated!