China, here I come again

Last week, I went to a job interview where I was spontaneously invited to go on a 4- day business trip to Beijing. It's only a couple days but I'm very excited but also anxious as I don't really know what I can contribute to the trip. If I pass the test, I will be signing the contract after the trip.

Now, I have two more weeks to prepare myself. Not only information about the company that we will visit but also some special vocabularies about the machines and stuff like that. Besides, I was asked to study a special treatment which is supposed to be quite promising. I will be reading publications and stuff about it, treating it like one of my research subjects...

I must say, I'm still quite baffled that I was asked to join the trip. On the second day, I told a couple of my friends about the offer and one of them jokingly said "maybe they want to sell you in China"... Don't hope think so... Everything seems quite legit. I got the flight information, the booking confirmation for the hotel. The company exists for almost 10 years. I've got the invitation letter and they will handle my visa. I hope everything will work out just fine... So long... I will keep you updated about my journey.

 

On Fire

Yesterday, I was out in Mannheim. Looking up into the sky I thought it was going to rain...

 

That was before I turned around and saw this... Really scary big smoke. I was afraid, it was something close to the main station but it was even in the next city.

Later that day, the news revealed there was a big factory fire in Ludwigshafen which was very persistent. It took several hours to kill it.

 

I don't actually know, how long people were supposed to keep the doors and windows shut... But even when the smoke disappeared in the evening, it still smelled like burned plastic and there were black ashy drops on all the parked cars in the area. Hope it really isn't toxic as they say in the news. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.

 

Nail polish: Essie Too Too Hot

Finally, it's summer time, the perfect time to wear bright nail polish. Good that I went shopping and bought Essie - Too Too Hot. It's a beautiful red with slightly pink undertone. Jettie from cholate-bit.ch calls it raspstrawberry - a mix of raspberry and strawberry. The perfect description I think...

 

I only needed one coat for this result but I had to repaint my nails after only 3 days, which is quite low for Essie. But maybe it will be more durable if I paint two coats. I haven't tried that yet...

 

Japanese Gifts

Thank you, Yoko! I love to get gift boxes from my friends, especially from far away... My friend Yoko sent me some Japanese sweets, a little pouch, and a postcard from Kyoto.

 

I use the pouch for my external hard drive now. It's so cute!

Do you remember my green tea posts? I love green tea matcha latte products from Japan. Taiwan has some products as well but they don't taste quite as good. Now, Yoko sent me these matcha latte langues du chat.

 

She also gave me these cute looking candy. I was a little afraid to eat them because I wasn't sure, if it was indeed candy. I've seen some soap shaped as pralines some weeks ago... Also it's quite a shame to eat anything that looks so adorable...

 

I liked the green tea langues du chat a lot better ^.^ I'm such a fan of green tea products.

 

[Job Applications] Anxious

I am anxiously waiting for a reply as I had a personal job interview for a small company around my city, where both of the bosses interviewed me. The staff is pretty young. They're all about my age, I believe. As my feeling tells me, we had a good connection. They asked me quite a lot of thoughtful questions, not a single one of these stupid standardized human resources question. (I'm planning on posting some of those as well...)

Anyway, I might be a little over-qualified as I've got a phd and speak several languages. They believe that one of the bigger companies could offer more opportunities. Not that those bigger ones are trying very hard though. It takes several months just for the bigger companies to answer. Of course, there's a lot of competition as well and the human resources has a lot of work to collect and sort out candidates.

Recently, I've discovered the blog "From Science to Business" << click >>. It's made by a female biology phd searching for jobs. She made two internships and wrote more than 100 job applications in three months, just to get 4 job interviews. I think, that's quite a lot of applications and quite little output. Seriously, I don't even know, if I could have applied for 100 jobs in that period. Maybe only if I didn't match the profiles...

She believes that the cover letter isn't important so she used standardized cover letters for all the applications. I don't know about that... I believe the cover letter is indeed read. I got quite a lot of questions from there in my interviews.

A staff member of jobvector.de gave a big talk on a career fair about even personalizing the curriculum vitae. I don't do that either because I haven't worked in the industry yet. Maybe in the future, when applying for the second of whatever job... An American executive coach told us about the American way of writing cover letters. He pointed out that they are the most important part of the application. It needs to be sharp, especially the first sentences. He thinks that Germans need to sell themselves a lot better in order to get the job. Most German companies in that fair disagree by the way... ;-) but I can't deny that most American professional talks have been excellent and entertaining while most German professors think their talks are the best when nobody understands what they're talking about.