GIS at Stanford

I noted that I quit around 830 and then watched TV.  I had been renting movies like Dr Who but I wrote that I wanted to engage mom for board games.  I went to bed at 12.  Next morning by ten I was reading about the debates for the Assembly seat.  I then prepared for an interview.  After that there was the thesis.

I set up for the interview.  The position was for a transportation planning position with technical expertise in GIS at Stanford.  I opened up Hangouts.  When he came on we talked about the Hangouts a bit and then we got the names right.  This was the first of two rounds and I was one of ten being interviewed.  He said that he had a bunch of questions that he would go through that that this would provide a guide for his evaluation.  I asked about the job and we talked about Don Shoup a bit.

The job is a data focused job and he wanted to evaluate my skills.  The first questions were about Data Management, table production and visualization.  I remember that I went over my experience with SQL here.  I started off recounting my early experiences with Cartography and ESRI’s GIS.  I then recounted my subsequent experiences with tables and Access.  I also went into how easy it is to learn the tools if you know the basic premise.  Ramses then told me a little bit about the products they use and what they will probably be using.  There was Pentaho and a few items that had an “R” plug in—Wekka and other data mining tools.

He asked about my experience with Java and Python—scripting, programming and command line.  I told him that I had experience as a student and that my practical experience extended to building one or two things on my own webpage and that some of the students in the lab were a part of that.  He then asked if I would be able to scan versions of open source products for errant links or if I had had experience with a debugger or a command line and I said that I definitely could do these things.

He then asked about modeling and I gave him some examples and then he asked specific questions and I indicated that a solution would require scripting and that there would have to be several iterations and a lot of time for both the processing and development.

He then asked about GIS and I made it clear that I was quite capable in this regard.  I gave cartographic and network analysis examples such as route optimization, scripting and online tools.

He then asked about my survey experiences.  Here I went into depth with the three examples I knew and hoped that this was enough.  I did one for my thesis, I helped with the campus alternative transportation office and then there was another one that I gave him.  I also asked him if the surveying was for CEQA and he said no.  He explained that every year they collect a representative survey from a population of 60000 campus users and that the data needs to be moved from the survey to tables and thence to analysis and that the successful candidate would be instrumental in the process.  He said that he was previously the person that did this job.

He asked me about my project management experience and I started with my dish washing job.  I then went into my English teaching and then to my experiences going into and out of Grad School.  I finished with the last two jobs.  He said that I seemed to have qualifying coordinator experience.  He said I probably get along with others.  It seemed clear that I hadn’t really had any Management experience though.  He asked me to explain to him why I should get the job and I said that this is the position that I wanted (my “dream job”) and that he had essentially gone over a long list of things that I was well qualified to do.

I then asked about the turnover and the office environment.  He seemed to think that there wasn’t a huge emphasis on punctuality and that working from home was occasionally possible.  He also said that there wasn’t a lot of turnover in the job and that a lot of people are around for years before they even consider moving on to something better.  He was taking over from his boss who was moving to the Airport.

When we wrapped things up it was a little awkward trying to cue him to end things.  In the midst of this he mentioned the cost of travel for the next round of interviews.  I had to correct his belief that I was in Long Beach still.  It may be that my being from outside the area was a plus.

Later I wrote that I was at Java Beach looking at my review.  I was trying to identify changes before working on the volume.  I had already done the roman pages.  I also read some of the Twitter.   I made two rounds of reading.  The first was a simple classification of each part of the Review.  There is the intro, the romans, asks, thesis notes and finally the Hb which I never really did anything with.  I then go into the thesis notes in more detail.

I made some keywords to address concerning the three different types of notes.  One is the CN, one is the old undone items and there are the completed notes.  I then listed out keywords from the CNs.  In Chapter 1 there are paragraph, substitution and conceptual issues.  In Chapter 2 there is spelling.  In Chapter 3 there are substitutions.  In Chapter 4 there are figure references, italics (questions), substitutions, terms (esp. library) and references.  Finally, in Chapter 5 there were substitutions, comments and terms to deal with.  Additionally, this chapter had several old items left over to deal with which may cause me to consider a rewrite.

I then started rereading the first pages.  I said that I noticed there are a lot of things in the review that I simply needed to eliminate.  I also need to recheck the submission date and the HB is crazy.

This is series chronicles my life at regular intervals. This Memo series is meant to be a retrospective of what I have written and experienced. In each of these posts I use my notes in conjunction with memory, mementos and souvenirs to create a snap shot of my life.