I was born to synthesize

Wow what a hectic week. Even though school doesn't start until Tuesday, you'd have never known if you were at the lab where I work this week. We had so much to do in preparation for the upcoming semester. I was in meetings every day this week. As I mentioned last time, we opened up the 4th floor lab on Wednesday. There were only a small handful of users who came in, so it was kinda slow in that aspect. I was so busy with my preparatory work that I didn't really get to enjoy the lack of people though.

Let me just say that making a work schedule is really hard and quite annoying. I thought it would be cool because I could set my own hours, but it's not nearly as glamorous as I imagined it to be. The unfortunate thing is that now that even though I got the schedule done, once classes start I'll have to go back and change it due to add/drops. blargg!

Thursday I had the priveledge of sitting in on interviews for the customer service position they were hiring for. Being that I'm the Customer Service Team Leader™ I had to greet the applicants, show them to the interview room, and sit in on their interview. I also had to ask them interview questions, which was kinda cool. I tried not to be too much of a jerk so I asked fairly simple questions. I guess I could have seized the opportunity to be evil, but the last thing I'd want when being interviewed is for some gimp to ask me retarded questions.

We interviewed 4 people and I got to see a variety of interview behavior which I must say was rather interesting. The first girl who interviewed was quite noticably nervous. Her interview started off well. She seemed quite proficient in the use of Macs which is very helpful for the job. The thing that got her though were the dreaded scenarios. My manager gives them an imaginary scenario and they have to say how they'd respond. My favorite question is the one about there being 2 phones in a house and one rings and the other doesn't, and you desperately want to know why. The interviewee has to then say how they'd go about figuring it out. This is a pretty simple question, but the scenarious usually blindside the applicants. They are often caught so off-guard they can't respond correctly. So the first girl blew the phone question completely. She got the other scenarios ok though. My managers were wanting to hire more girls to our predominantly male batch of employees, so she left the interview a strong candidate.

The second girl took the silent approach to the whole interview thing. Her responses were way too brief, she didn't seem very enthusiastic about the whole thing, and she blew the scenarios. On top of that, she didn't seem to have a whole lot of computer-related experience (which is pretty necessary for working in a friggin computer lab..). Needless to say, she walked out of her interview with an X next to her name.

We had a short break before the next applicant's interview, so I sat with my managers discussing the previous interviews until the next guy showed up. Once he arrived, we got his interview underway. His interview went well, since he had a lot of the experience we were looking for, so he left as the top candidate. One of my managers thought his personality was a bit dry, but I didn't really think so. So after he left we discussed the applicants and then decided to bring in one last person for a last-minute interview. His application seemed promising, so we thought we'd get him in to see what he can offer. He was able to come in despite the short notice so we gave him a shot. He seemed well-suited for the job and had a lot of webdesign experience, but lacked some of the other experience we were looking for. He also provided several URLs to sites he did, but none of them were very impressive. (For the love of god don't design a website in Word, kthx.) Basically it came down to this guy or the previous guy. One thing was for sure though. It felt good to be on the other side of a job interview. ;)

This is where I myself was caught off-guard. After the final interviewee left, my manager told me take some time and pick who I thought would be best for us. I just figured he meant I'd offer my thoughts on who to hire and they'd make the decision. However, the final decision was completely up to me. I wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility. Basically I held the future of 4 people in my hands and it was up to me to decide who would be granted this job. What a burden. I don't know why, but I didn't like the feeling I got having to bear such responsibility, but it had to be done. I ended up hiring guy #3. I kinda think my managers were leaning toward #4, but they made no real indication of this to me, so I just went with my gut feeling. Hopefully he does well with us, because if he doesn't, it's gonna be all on me. :(

Yesterday I spent the day with the AppDev Team Leader™ training the two new peeps. (We hired another AppDev but I had no part in that since I'm not on that team.) It's a little difficult to train people on what we do because there is just way too much info to cover in one day. They'll manage though. When I was hired there I was basically thrown into the fray and had to figure most of it out myself. Meh.

Classes start Tuesday, and I won't be taking any japanese classes (something I haven't done since first semester of my freshman year). I'm kinda sad I've taken all the japanese classes at UT. I really want to take more. :'( I am taking an asian studies class about japan though, so that's almost like taking japanese. Plus, the professor for the gov class I'm taking is a japanese guy, so I guess it's not a total loss, heh. I'm not looking forward to this semester but it's coming regardless, so I might as well grin and bear it. I could really use another month of vacation though..