[SOUND] Hi, I'm Lyla Fujiwara.
I'm a course developer here at Udacity and
these are my thoughts on crappy interviews.
So this is kind of funny because interviews are like
a little bit the bane of my existence.
I'm sort of like, I've thought about this story a little bit but
I'm shaking a little bit right now just because I'm being asked a question.
In my senior year, a lot of people were applying to go work in big
tech companies and I was sort of thinking about it, but
I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and
sort of one of the things in my mind was like well,
I have this very clear path for what I can do.
I'm going to have this degree.
It could probably get me into like a really nice tech company and
I could just keep doing what I'm doing, but at the time I was a little bit,
you know, just questioning if that's what I wanted.
Anyways, I had TAed for this professor who's actually a leader in graphics,
the field of graphics and had been a TA from one of his larger classes and
I think this is what got me on sort of the short list for a list
of students that a large tech company was particularly trying to recruit.
So I got this invite and I kind of like didn't respond for a while and
I'm like whatever free trip out to the West Coast.
So I did it, I went there and I got put in,
it was either my first or my second technical interview.
And technical interviews are super stressful [LAUGH] I feel like,
partially just because there's so exhausting.
They're ten hour ordeals, or at least this one was, and
you're being bused around and meeting all the different teams.
And I remember early in the morning of that interview, talking to
a guy who was super friendly and I was having a good conversation with him,
but we were talking about printer drivers and in the back of my head while
I'm trying to answer questions from this guy, I'm thinking, printer drivers.
That's the most boring thing I can ever think of and
I talked to some other people during that interview experience.
There's a part that I don't remember quite how I flubbed it, but
I was talking to a guy about how a web page was put together with how it's
actually parsed on a server and I had no idea how that was actually done and
he was getting kind of frustrated with me or whatever.
But I got far along in the process, so I was feeling pretty good of myself and
like, I just really breezed through this interview.
Yeah sure, I messed up some things with a seed graph, and a web server, or
something, but I'll be fine.
And about a week later, I got a phone call saying,
which is probably fairly obvious to you, that I didn't get the job and
I was kind of sitting there and feeling really sorry for myself.
But I think the thing that I got out of it and
kind of what I want to convey I guess to Udacity students is
that I wasn't really supposed to be at that interview.
That job wasn't something that I was particularly interested in.
I didn't really take ownership for the job application process.
And so actually what I did end up doing was instead of going off and working
with a big tech company, I went into the Peace Corps and I taught for two years.
And after coming back from the Peace Corps in a similar thing, I say I should
apply to these large tech companies who do the whole interview process.
But one of the things that I did differently the second time around, was
in a dusty Kenyan market, I bought this book called
What Color Is Your Parachute, which is a quintessential career guidance book.
And one of the sort of silly things that it made me do was walk
through a series of exercises to learn about what actually is important to you,
what you're interested in more than just you what your skillset is or
what you happenned to get your degree in.
And through doing that, I was a lot better able to verbalize what I wanted.
And as I was going through the job search, I didn't apply to a lot of jobs
which on paper looked kind of good, if I got hired there,
it would be a good thing to brag to my family and friends about or
whatever, but they weren't jobs I was actually interested in.
And the first job that I applied for was Udacity and I read the job description,
and I went this is perfect, this is awesome and this is where I want to be.