Vocation Alteration

Hello family and friends. As promised in my last post I need to talk about this job interview/presentation I had two Mondays ago. It was for a Business Systems Analyst position with the eResearch department of ITS at U of M.

Photos are a selection of slides are from my presentation.

I had to do a presentation on a technical topic (of my choosing) to a non-technical audience. Since photography is a passion of mine, I decided to do the presentation on "How Aperture Affects a Photograph" which my audience really seemed to like! They also really liked the fact that I used Google Presentation for my slideshow instead of PowerPoint since U of M has "Gone Google!" The photos are of some of the slides in my presentation.

So like I mentioned last time, I was told on Friday 3/30 that I would have to present this on Monday 4/2! Yikes! The hiring manager asked me on Friday if I'd be up for doing the presentation the next Monday and my thought process was pretty much this..."Whoa! That's not enough time! I was always given at least a week in college. This isn't college stupid, it's the real world. Crap! I can't tell her 'no' or suggest a different day because then I'll seem incompetent and that I'm not confident that I'm able to meet deadlines." I said..."Monday's perfect!"

I told Cass that I wanted the whole weekend to work on this, so the bathroom remodel would have to be put on hold for a weekend. Not only did I have to come up with the material for the presentation, I needed to take/make the photos I was going to use in the presentation as examples. For example, I took a couple photos of cars driving on i-94 for one illustration. I went out to the pedestrian bridge over i-94 in Belleville to get a good vantage point for the cars driving by. I got a few funny looks from drivers probably wondering what the heck I was doing. I also wanted a series of photos for another illustration that involved a falling baseball. I wanted to illustrate that differences in shutter speed by changing the aperture. So, I set the camera up on the tripod, tossed the ball in the air a bunch of times, and tried taking the picture at just the right moment. Not as easy a task as I'd hoped. I ended up taking over 100 pictures in that exercise and ended up with a handful of usable pictures and whole bunch of pictures of a blank white wall.

I finished a draft of the presentation on Saturday afternoon and we went to have dinner with my parents. I practiced presenting it to them and got some useful feedback. Dad really seemed to like my illustrations on Depth of Field. On Sunday, I practiced presenting to Cass again and put the finishing touches on it.

Monday (4/2) comes and my interview is scheduled for 11am. Right off, I could tell my audience seemed excited to learn about a photography related topic, maybe except for Peter (one of my old co-workers who was there for my interview). I'll bet he already knew everything I presented. Hopefully he at least enjoyed my pictures. Felt to me like it went without a hitch and I had a really satisfied feeling that I'd genuinely done my best. I also had some great feedback about the presentation and my skills in general from my audience.

After all that and a week and 3 days of anxiously waiting, I got the job! I just signed my offer letter yesterday (4/12)! I know there were a lot of people praying for me and I thank you from the bottom of heart for that!

I start the new job on April 30th.