Job search update

It's been about three weeks since I found out about the PMF thing falling through, and the job search goes on. Half for personal reference and half for public consumption, I thought I'd write a note about how things are going.

I interviewed with a B2B wholesaler in Lake County, Illinois, but that didn't work out. I thought I interviewed well, but I'll bet they went with someone who's fluent in Chinese. That's too bad because I'd have liked to move back to the place I went to high school.

I'm still holding out for a position with a weather software developer nearby. That would be nice because Madison's a nice area, and my parents would prefer to have us closer rather than farther.

I had a horrible interview with an import-export company in California. Because I was in Wisconsin, they arranged a conference call between me and a panel of interviewers. I thought were going well until they ambushed me with Chinese and Korean tests -- I'm sorely out of practice in both, and didn't know they were going to do that.

The Mandarin speaker spoke way too fast, and I got blown away because he started things off going full speed. Like a deer in headlights, I froze and just couldn't recover. He asked me to introduce myself, and I could only stammer out random sentences. It was embarrassing.

The Korean test was similar, but with an added element of confusion. Because my wife was next to me and could hear the other side, she started writing notes to help my comprehension. The only problem is that I'd get focused on reading her notes and would then miss the next question. I couldn't think fast enough to come up with responses. What a debacle. For the rest of that day and all of the following I was depressed. I kept thinking, I'll never be fluent. Maybe it's better if I don't even try....

Korean schools are calling me left and right, but that's the last thing I want to do -- go back to teaching English. It'd be easy and quick, but I'd be embarrassed to go back into the same exact thing I was doing before I got my MBA. Still, because I'm married to a Korean citizen, I could be an F-2 visa (the Korean version of a green card), which would open things up to work in a Korean company.

Finally, there's the idea to teach English in Japan. I have an interview in Chicago on Saturday the 14th, which I look forward to. It's about as prestigious as going back to Korea, but because there are a bunch of JAIMS alumni there, it might not be so bad.

More news on this later.