作者：爱花 来源：世外园林论坛 时间：2007-02-23 点击：3 上传：paya原文地址：
世外园林论坛
http://www.shiy.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=4802
现在，有很多朋友都对种（species）和品种（cultivar）的概念及内涵比较模糊，不少人认为，品种就是种以下的分类单位，其实不然。在详细说明种和品种的区别与联系之前，有必要先简单的介绍一下植物的学名，假如在下面的叙述中，有些术语您不太理解，请先继续往下读，这些术语在后文中都会有解释。
一.关键词：植物学名
根据《国际植物命名法规》，植物的学名（scientific name）即拉丁名，都使用拉丁文的词或拉丁化的词来命名。在国际上，任何一个拉丁名，只对应一种植物，任何一种植物，只有一个拉丁名。这就保证了植物学名的唯一性和通用性，避免了同物异名或同名异物现象。植物学名的命名方法根据植物种类不同使用双名法或三名法。
（一）双名法
双名法是由瑞典植物学家林奈（Carl Linnaeus）发明的，它用于对种（species）一级的野生植物以及自然起源的栽培植物进行命名，双名法书写的植物学名由三部分组成（没有特别需要时，可省略成两部分），其完整内容和书写格式如下：
属名 genus epithet（斜体，首字母大写）＋种加词 species epithet（斜体，全部字母小写）＋种命名人名字（正体，首字母大写）
1.说明：
（1）种命名人名字这一项，如果命名人是著名的植物学家，他的姓氏要使用缩写形式，缩写时一定要在缩写名的右下角使用省略号“.”，名（given name）省略不写；不著名的植物学者的姓氏（family name）应该写全称，名（given name）需要使用缩写形式，但名（given name）也可省略不写。
（2）在不影响交流和科学性的情况下，种命名人的名字这一项可省略不写，这样一个双名法植物学名就省略成属名和种加词两部分了。
2.举例（因为编辑起来很麻烦，所以学名各部分的斜体和正体不做区分了，都用正体，但请注意这是不符合规范的）：
（1）中文名 垂笑君子兰 学名 Clivia nobilis Lindl. 其中 clivia 意为君子兰属，是为纪念克莱夫（Clive），将Clive拉丁化为形容词 clivia，作为这个属的属名；nobilis 是种加词，意为高贵的，壮丽的；Lindl. 是这个种的命名人，植物学家 John Lindley 的姓氏的缩写形式。
（2）中文名 大花君子兰 学名 C. miniata Regel 其中C. 是属名 clivia的缩写形式，根据规定，当同一属名重复出现时（植物学专著和索引除外），从第二次出现开始，必须使用缩写形式；种加词 miniata 意为 朱红色的，指君子兰的花色；Regel 是命名人，植物学家 Eduard Regel 姓氏的全称。
（3）中文名 窄叶君子兰 学名 C. gardenii Hook. 其中种加词 gardenii，是为纪念梅杰·加登（Major Garden），将其姓氏Garden拉丁化为名词所有格形式 gardenii ，作为这个种的种加词；Hook. 是命名人植物学家 William Jackson Hooker的姓氏缩写形式。
（4）中文名 具茎君子兰 学名 C. caulescens R. A. Dyerin 其中种加词 caulescens 意为具茎的；R. A. Dyerin 是命名人的名字，名 R. A.是缩写形式，Dyerin为姓氏全称，类似的形式还有例（3）的 William Jackson Hooker 也可写为 W. J. Hooker
（5）中文名 奇异君子兰 学名 C. mirabilis 其中种加词 mirabilis 意为奇异的，可惊愕的；种命名人名字省略。
（6）中文名 粗壮君子兰 学名 C. robusta 其中种加词 robusta 意为粗壮的；种命名人名字省略。
（二）三名法
三名法是以双名法为基础制定的，用以对种以下（变种variety，亚种subspecies，变型form ）等级的野生植物，和栽培起源的栽培植物进行命名，三名法书写的植物学名由六部分组成（没有特别需要的情况下可省略成四部分），其完整内容和书写格式如下：
属名 genus epithet（斜体，首字母大写）＋种加词 species epithet（斜体，全部字母小写）＋种命名人名字（正体，首字母大写）＋变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）符号 var. （subsp. f. cv.）〔正体，所有符号小写〕＋变种（亚种，变型，栽培）加词〔斜体，全部字母小写〕＋变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）命名人名字〔正体，首字母大写〕
1.说明：
（1）这个公式初看非常冗长繁杂，其实它就是在一个二名法种名的三部分后面再加上一个和二名法内容及书写规则完全相同的三部分变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）的名字。非常有规律。
（2）在没有特定需要的情况下，种和变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）的命名人名字都可以省略不写。这样一个三名法植物学名就省略成属名，种加词，变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）符号 和 变种（亚种，变型，栽培变种）加词 四部分了。
（3）种加词和变种加词不能相同，但原变种（原亚种，原变型，原栽培变种）的种加词和变种（亚种，变型，栽培）加词必须相同。
2.举例（虽然不符合规范，但为了方便，字母仍全部用正体书写）：
（1）变种：中文名 黄花君子兰 学名 C. miniata var. aurea 其中C. miniata是大花君子兰的学名；变种符号var.是拉丁文 varietas（变种）的缩写，该符号表明 黄花君子兰（C. miniata var. aurea）是 大花君子兰（C. miniata）种内的一个变种；aurea是变种加词（variety epithet），意为金黄色的，指该变种的花色金黄；种和变种命名人的名字都省略了（后面的例子也同样省略了命名人名字）。
（2）栽培变种（也称栽培型）：中文名 ‘火焰’大花君子兰 学名 C. miniata cv.'Flame' 其中C. miniata是大花君子兰的学名；栽培变种（栽培型）符号cv. 是拉丁文cultivarietas（栽培变种/栽培型）的缩写，该符号表明‘火焰’大花君子兰（C. miniata cv.'Flame'） 是 大花君子兰（C. miniata） 种内的一个栽培变种（栽培型）；'Flame'是该栽培变种的栽培加词（cultivar epithet），英文Flame意为火焰，指该栽培变种的花色火红，花团锦簇似火焰；栽培变种比较特殊，依照《国际栽培植物命名法规》和《圣路易斯法规》的规定，栽培加词必须放在英文单引号''中间，并且栽培加词的来源非常广泛，甚至可以用阿拉伯数字和英文字母混合编号，栽培加词的个数也可以是2个或者3个，比如本例中的C. miniata cv.'Flame'的栽培加词'Flame'是一个英文单词，而 大花君子兰（C. miniata） 种内的另一个栽培变种 C. miniata cv.'Cape Red'的栽培加词'Cape Red'就是两个英文单词；栽培变种符号 cv.也可以省略不写，即C. miniata cv.'Flame'可写成C. miniata 'Flame' 由于此种省略的写法使一个栽培变种的学名只有属名，种名，栽培加词三部分，很简洁，所以应用较多。需要说明的是，有些学者认为当cv.没有被省略的时候，栽培加词不用加单引号，直接写成C. miniata cv. Flame 的形式（甚至中国植物志也这样书写），但根据《国际栽培植物命名法规》和《圣路易斯法规》的最新版规定，还是要加单引号的。
（3）变型：中文名 重瓣木芙蓉 学名 Hibiscus mutabilis f. plenus 其中H. mutabilis是木芙蓉的学名，Hibiscus意为木槿属，表明 木芙蓉（H. mutabilis） 是属于木槿属的一个种；种加词mutabilis意为易变的，指木芙蓉的花色易变化；变型符号 f.是拉丁文Forma（变型）的缩写，该符号表明 重瓣木芙蓉（Hibiscus mutabilis f. plenus） 是 木芙蓉（H. mutabilis） 种内的一个变型；plenus是变型加词（form epithet），意为重复的，丰富的，指这个变型的花瓣多重（即重瓣）。
（4）亚种：中文名 凹叶厚朴 学名 Magnolia officinalis subsp. biloba 其中M. officinalis 是厚朴的学名，属名Magnolia意为 木兰属，表明 厚朴（M. officinalis） 是属于木兰属的一个种；种加词officinalis 意为 药用的，指该种植物有药用价值；亚种符号subsp.（也可以写成ssp.）是拉丁文subspecies的缩写，该符号表明 凹叶厚朴（Magnolia officinalis subsp. bilob） 是 厚朴（M. officinalis） 种内的一个亚种；biloba是亚种加词（subspecies plenus），意为二裂的，指该亚种的叶片二裂，因此叶缘出现凹陷缺刻。
Monday, April 23, 2007
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs (2005-06-12)
Tran of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs
Posted on 06/14/2005 4:18:09 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
Posted on 06/14/2005 4:18:09 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
Monday, April 2, 2007
英特尔传奇老总Andy Grove讲事业人生
Avoid random motion.
Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
Satisfaction doesn't come in moments but in periods of time.
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn't the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.
Take a bit of the future and make it your present.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
We're living the Next Big Thing. It's a little like living in the time when electricity was in its early stages. It took decades for electricity to change the landscape. We're in the early stages of recasting our commercial lives, our professional lives, our health practices, everything.
You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don't let anyone tell you different.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You're not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again--you can't step into the river again at the same place and the same time--but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.
Status is a very dangerous thing. I've met too many people who make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address, because that's for everybody else but not them. It's hard to fight the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives.
It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work.
Assume any career moves you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.
A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.
Denial can blind.
It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.
When you have cancer, there's always a finite chance that it will recur, so talking about the whole experience in past tense is a little presumptuous. So yes, I have faced the prospect of dying, of having a specific cause of mortality hanging over my head for the rest of my life. But I don't think the experience changed me, not that either I or anyone close to me has been able to spot.
All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.
Retirement is a process. You have to figure out the new rules, and you have to figure out what works under the new rules.
The most powerful tool of all is the word no. There's never enough time.
Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
Satisfaction doesn't come in moments but in periods of time.
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn't the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.
Take a bit of the future and make it your present.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
We're living the Next Big Thing. It's a little like living in the time when electricity was in its early stages. It took decades for electricity to change the landscape. We're in the early stages of recasting our commercial lives, our professional lives, our health practices, everything.
You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don't let anyone tell you different.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You're not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again--you can't step into the river again at the same place and the same time--but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.
Status is a very dangerous thing. I've met too many people who make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address, because that's for everybody else but not them. It's hard to fight the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives.
It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work.
Assume any career moves you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.
A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.
Denial can blind.
It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.
When you have cancer, there's always a finite chance that it will recur, so talking about the whole experience in past tense is a little presumptuous. So yes, I have faced the prospect of dying, of having a specific cause of mortality hanging over my head for the rest of my life. But I don't think the experience changed me, not that either I or anyone close to me has been able to spot.
All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.
Retirement is a process. You have to figure out the new rules, and you have to figure out what works under the new rules.
The most powerful tool of all is the word no. There's never enough time.
My job hunting story - 2
from http://web.wenxuecity.com/BBSView.php?SubID=career_best&MsgID=133
2 September 2001 and IT
I chose to study IT in 2001 after I got my first master in Economics, because I strongly believed the combination of Finance and IT would bring me to the Wall Street. Wall Street was my dream for my entire college life. I was shocked when I heard the news on September 11, but did not realize that it would have such a big impact on my personal life.
The one-year program was tough, especially for me from a Finance background. I was scheduled to take fifteen courses a year and work on two teaching assistant jobs per semester. The annual job fair was scheduled in October. Most of the banks on the Wall Street canceled their on-campus interviews. Instead, we found a box on their booths, reading “Sorry we can not come to the on-campus interviews. Please place your resume in the box.” People threw their resumes in the box, without hoping for anything. My dream to work on the Wall Street became dim….
3 To Fight or To Die
3.1 Pre-Selection for On-Campus Interview
For students on the campus, the single most important way to look for jobs is the on-campus interview sponsored by the career services center. That year, it was very difficult to get pre-selected for on-campus interviews, because so many people were competing for limited number of openings. Our program had almost 120 students and it was full of depressing atmosphere in the building. I don’t have to describe the tough situation. If you have experienced job hunting, you know it.
Just one year ago in 2000, candidates would land 1 interview every day during the busy season. I was determined to have at least one interview per week. I pretty much hit my goal. The tricks to get more pre-selections include:
1. Be very aggressive in the job fair. For those who are afraid of English public speaking, this might be a tough job. But in order to land a job, we have to overcome this obstacle. The earlier you get over it, the sooner you will land a job.
a. Research the companies that will come to the job fair, understand their business and the kind of people they are looking for, circle down the companies you are really interested in;
b. Prepare 60 seconds self introduction (concise and right-to-the-point);
c. If you realize that a position is a good fit for you, seize opportunity to sell yourself. Ask “could you please give me more information about the position” or “could you please let me know what kind of person you are looking for?” After their introduction, you could say, “I am exactly the type of person you are looking for. My training in … helped me build strong skills in… My project (working) experiences in … prepared me for…” Remember: be enthusiastic and be brave!
d. Ask for the business cards from the person and try to get more information regarding their rights in hiring. Keep the cards and follow up with emails or mails.
2. Tailor each resume according to the requirement of each job. I found this very effective. I especially paid attention to the skills required (the “key words”), and put as many key words as possible in the resume. Our campus job system allows each person to upload 10 resumes. Most of the people I know only uploaded 2 or 3. I had 2 at that time: one for IT, and one for IT and Finance combination. One day, my Indian friend showed me his 10 resumes. He told me he always had 10 for different positions and for different companies. It worked. He got interviews from all the major IT companies. Amazingly enough, he got almost all the interviews from the limited number of banks who offered on-campus interviews, even though he knew nothing about finance. I admit that his strong communication skills (he spoke with strong accent) contributed to his success, but without his efforts, so many interviews were just missions impossible.
3. Go to the information session and career center for the open slots for the interviews you are really interested in. How ironically that not a lot of people are doing that. I got three interviews with this technique for which I was not originally pre-selected, which led to three on-site interviews, and two internship positions. The two companies are Goldman Sachs in New York (I actually got three position in three different groups; they asked me to choose one among the three.) and Citadel Investment in Chicago.
4. Do not give up each opportunity, even though you think it is not possible. If you try it, you lose nothing; but if you don’t try, you lose the world.
3.2 Prepare for Interviews
After I started working at my current company, I got the opportunity to interview many candidates. Once the candidates pass the basic technical requirements, we would look at their personality and communication skills. The question we always asked was, “will the guy/girl be very nice to work with.” It took me a long time to understand this when I was doing my job hunting.
My first interview was in mid October with an equity firm, I failed. I failed all of my interviews for the fall semester. During those three months, I had interviews with Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, Black Rock, The Hull Group, First Credit Suisse Boston, and Convergys (I could not remember those small firms that interviewed me.) I went back home in China during winter vacation hoping the Hull group will give a surprise. They gave me a NO on the day I returned to the United States. The semester was tough to me. I was glad I could go through it.
My disadvantages in job interviews include two aspects. 1) communication kills. One day, I had mock interviews with my Indian friend. He asked me some basic questions. I was so embarrassed. I sort of knew the answers, but really did not know how to answer them nicely. 2) not enough technical IT knowledge. I was never an IT person. I started my program in May and hardly learned enough for the interviews, but I had to get ready for the fall job fair.
Some of the stories during my interviews in the first semester:
Interview with Morgan Stanly. “Humiliated” is the word I want to use. It was in October 2001. In order to impress the interviewers, I prepared PowerPoint presentation of all the projects I worked on. I drew graphs explaining the background and technology employed in those projects. The Vice President first asked me several basic questions, and then he turned to the projects I worked on. He asked me some details regarding the implementation, I was so nervous that I could not remember what it was. My heart was pounding and racing. He asked, “did you work on the projects by yourself?” I replied, “yes. But I am so nervous….@#&%” Thirty minutes later, I fled from the interview room. I cried; I could not help it. I know the opportunity with Morgan Stanley was gone.
Lessen: know you stuff. Every line on your resume could be a story. If you could not explain something, it means you are not technically strong or you are not honest.
Interview with Salomon Smith Barney (SSB). It was with the capital markets group – my dream job. The interview went well (I thought, because nothing went wrong). I was waiting for the feedback. My Indian friend also participated the interview. He told me that he got the notice for on-site interview the second day after the on-campus one. He was from a chemical engineering major, which has nothing to do with finance. I have so many years’ experiences in finance. What went wrong? When he was packing for the on-site interview, I got an email from the human resource representative at SSB. I got rejected. As always, the reason for rejection was that they had found better candidates. I was so confused and I could not help calling the vice president who interviewed me. He said, “you are definitely a strong candidate, but you might not have strong computer programming skills as required. We need people to do some computer modeling work.” I was so emotional. I told him, “I have very strong skills in programming. I used to develop financial models overcoming the deficiencies of the Black-Sholes model using C++, MATLAB, Guass…….” He was probably convinced and told me he would discuss with the HR people. I sent him a follow-up email, with a copy of the abstract of my master thesis in financial modeling. Several days later, I got rejected again. I doubted whether he ever discussed with HR people, because if he made a decision to bring me back, it means he made a mistake of not brining me in the first time.
Lesson: I did not truly understand what he was looking for, so I was not able to sell my skills within the 30 minutes interview.
Interview with Black Rock. First of all, I really liked that position. The interviewer asked me why I was interested in Black Rock. I had my one-minute introduction. I mentioned I had strong skills in IT, good personality, and strong interest in IT type of jobs in the banking environment. Then he said, “well, I am a VP in the marketing and accounting department. I can refer you to the IT department.” Oh, my God. I wanted to cry, but I did not have tears. Apparently, I did not get the second round. I was too eager to sell myself and express my interest, but it was the wrong target.
Lessen: If you are not sure what kind of persons they are looking for, ask them. The question I always ask is “could you please tell me what kind of people are you looking for?” After they answered, I would say, “I am exactly the type of person.” Then I would sell myself from three perspectives: technical, personality, strong enthusiasm toward the company and industry and even the group.”
Interviews with the Hull Group. As time went on, my interview skills increased a lot, as well as my technical skills. The Hull Group was also my dream job. It is an equity-trading firm based in Chicago and became a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs in late 1990s. I had two round on-campus interviews with two different groups. The equity-trading group selected me for the on-site interview. I was so scared; it was my first on-site interview and it was already December 2001. Due to some miscommunication with the HR people, my interview was postponed. One day The Hull Group gave me a phone call, telling me that they had to give me another round of phone interview before they could bring me in for the on-site interview. We did it. It was not bad, although I was scared to death, as always. A lot of technical and behavior questions.
The on-site interview started at 9:00 am and finished at 6:00 pm with a one-hour lunch. I met almost 10 people in the morning. They threw all kinds of questions to me – technical, personal, case study, and anything they could think of. In the afternoon, they wanted to test my C++ programming skills. Tell you the truth, I never took a course in C++; I studied chapters in “How to programming in C++” before I came to the interview. Thank God, all the questions were multiple choices, so at least I could guess. It took me almost 2 hours in the exam. I guess I did well, because I got to meet the head of the group after all the scheduled interviews. The guy looked very nice. He said I did very well. He asked me several simple questions such as “what is the most unforgettable experience in the United States?”, “how do you like the job?” I answered and I thought I did well. Several days later, I got a call from the Hull Group telling me that they could not decided and had to give me a phone interview again. “My God.” I though, “Just tell me, yes or not – why are you torturing me?” Several days later, I had a phone interview with four people from the group – all scenario questions. I waited for a long time for the final decision. It was a “NO.”
Later in the spring semester, the head came to the campus for summer intern interviews. I waited for almost an hour to get the chance to talk with him. He still remembered me. He told me, “The job market is really tough. It if were last year, we would definitely give you the offer. A lot of people want to go to New York, so they reject the offers from our group, but this year, none of them. You did very well, but you had to be yourself. From your answers, I could no tell what kind of person you are. You gave me the impression of memorizing what you have prepared.” At that time, I was already an expert in interviews. I talked with him and he agreed to give me a chance to interview with the technology group at Goldman in New York. It was already March 2002. I did very well in the interview and got the internship opportunities from three groups within Goldman.
Lessen: Be yourself. Never neglect the important the behavior questions! They could kill you just because simple questions like “what was the most unforgettable experience.”
Indian friends taught me how to stand out during interviews. I have to tell you that this Indian guy is very smart. Although a lot of Chinese classmates did not like him, he was one of the strongest. He knew a lot of tricks on how to draw people’s attention and how to lead an interview. He said before each interview, he would search the Internet for latest news related to that company. He succeeded the on-campus interview with Citi Group because he asked questions that distinguished him from other candidates. (Isn’t it amazing that he knew nothing about Finance, but always got pre-selection, and always got on-site interviews?) He asked the woman who interviewed him, “I got to know that there was a big merger and acquisition between Company A and Group B in your company, which has a big impact in the … market. Could you please give some comments…?” The woman said, “wow, I even do not know that, so I can not give any comments. I need to go back and check. But this is very good.” He got the on-site interview, but another classmate from Singapore who had three years’ experiences in banking industry did not. I once had an interview at a big consulting firm. I was scheduled to meet 15 people the whole day. After the morning session, I felt that they had a lot of concerns about my writing and communication skills. In the afternoon, my first interview with the partner went well. I mentioned an articled he published on the company’s website and showed strong interests. He smiled and gave me some comments. As always, I asked him what kind of people they were looking for. He smiled and said, “we are looking for people just like yourself who are smart, intelligent, and enthusiastic.” I think it is probably because of him that the company did not kill me in the first round.
Lessen: Small things make you stand out among candidates. Small conversations with key people make a lot of difference. Talk with people who are experts in interviews and learn from them. Don’t complain or just simply admire other people. Try to understand what the hell makes difference between you and them.If it is communication, learn English; if it is technical, do your homework. Remember, we are smart Chinese.
There are so many stories I could share. Most important things: to be proactive, be enthusiastic, be technically strong, and to make sure they like you when you answer behavior questions. At the end of the semester, although I did not land any jobs, I already prepared almost 20 pages of interview questions. I wrote the answers to each question, rewrote them for each interview. I started to understand what my Indian friends meant when he said, “you have to learn how to lead the interviewer.” It is an art. If you can master the art of interviews, you will land any jobs.
2 September 2001 and IT
I chose to study IT in 2001 after I got my first master in Economics, because I strongly believed the combination of Finance and IT would bring me to the Wall Street. Wall Street was my dream for my entire college life. I was shocked when I heard the news on September 11, but did not realize that it would have such a big impact on my personal life.
The one-year program was tough, especially for me from a Finance background. I was scheduled to take fifteen courses a year and work on two teaching assistant jobs per semester. The annual job fair was scheduled in October. Most of the banks on the Wall Street canceled their on-campus interviews. Instead, we found a box on their booths, reading “Sorry we can not come to the on-campus interviews. Please place your resume in the box.” People threw their resumes in the box, without hoping for anything. My dream to work on the Wall Street became dim….
3 To Fight or To Die
3.1 Pre-Selection for On-Campus Interview
For students on the campus, the single most important way to look for jobs is the on-campus interview sponsored by the career services center. That year, it was very difficult to get pre-selected for on-campus interviews, because so many people were competing for limited number of openings. Our program had almost 120 students and it was full of depressing atmosphere in the building. I don’t have to describe the tough situation. If you have experienced job hunting, you know it.
Just one year ago in 2000, candidates would land 1 interview every day during the busy season. I was determined to have at least one interview per week. I pretty much hit my goal. The tricks to get more pre-selections include:
1. Be very aggressive in the job fair. For those who are afraid of English public speaking, this might be a tough job. But in order to land a job, we have to overcome this obstacle. The earlier you get over it, the sooner you will land a job.
a. Research the companies that will come to the job fair, understand their business and the kind of people they are looking for, circle down the companies you are really interested in;
b. Prepare 60 seconds self introduction (concise and right-to-the-point);
c. If you realize that a position is a good fit for you, seize opportunity to sell yourself. Ask “could you please give me more information about the position” or “could you please let me know what kind of person you are looking for?” After their introduction, you could say, “I am exactly the type of person you are looking for. My training in … helped me build strong skills in… My project (working) experiences in … prepared me for…” Remember: be enthusiastic and be brave!
d. Ask for the business cards from the person and try to get more information regarding their rights in hiring. Keep the cards and follow up with emails or mails.
2. Tailor each resume according to the requirement of each job. I found this very effective. I especially paid attention to the skills required (the “key words”), and put as many key words as possible in the resume. Our campus job system allows each person to upload 10 resumes. Most of the people I know only uploaded 2 or 3. I had 2 at that time: one for IT, and one for IT and Finance combination. One day, my Indian friend showed me his 10 resumes. He told me he always had 10 for different positions and for different companies. It worked. He got interviews from all the major IT companies. Amazingly enough, he got almost all the interviews from the limited number of banks who offered on-campus interviews, even though he knew nothing about finance. I admit that his strong communication skills (he spoke with strong accent) contributed to his success, but without his efforts, so many interviews were just missions impossible.
3. Go to the information session and career center for the open slots for the interviews you are really interested in. How ironically that not a lot of people are doing that. I got three interviews with this technique for which I was not originally pre-selected, which led to three on-site interviews, and two internship positions. The two companies are Goldman Sachs in New York (I actually got three position in three different groups; they asked me to choose one among the three.) and Citadel Investment in Chicago.
4. Do not give up each opportunity, even though you think it is not possible. If you try it, you lose nothing; but if you don’t try, you lose the world.
3.2 Prepare for Interviews
After I started working at my current company, I got the opportunity to interview many candidates. Once the candidates pass the basic technical requirements, we would look at their personality and communication skills. The question we always asked was, “will the guy/girl be very nice to work with.” It took me a long time to understand this when I was doing my job hunting.
My first interview was in mid October with an equity firm, I failed. I failed all of my interviews for the fall semester. During those three months, I had interviews with Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, Black Rock, The Hull Group, First Credit Suisse Boston, and Convergys (I could not remember those small firms that interviewed me.) I went back home in China during winter vacation hoping the Hull group will give a surprise. They gave me a NO on the day I returned to the United States. The semester was tough to me. I was glad I could go through it.
My disadvantages in job interviews include two aspects. 1) communication kills. One day, I had mock interviews with my Indian friend. He asked me some basic questions. I was so embarrassed. I sort of knew the answers, but really did not know how to answer them nicely. 2) not enough technical IT knowledge. I was never an IT person. I started my program in May and hardly learned enough for the interviews, but I had to get ready for the fall job fair.
Some of the stories during my interviews in the first semester:
Interview with Morgan Stanly. “Humiliated” is the word I want to use. It was in October 2001. In order to impress the interviewers, I prepared PowerPoint presentation of all the projects I worked on. I drew graphs explaining the background and technology employed in those projects. The Vice President first asked me several basic questions, and then he turned to the projects I worked on. He asked me some details regarding the implementation, I was so nervous that I could not remember what it was. My heart was pounding and racing. He asked, “did you work on the projects by yourself?” I replied, “yes. But I am so nervous….@#&%” Thirty minutes later, I fled from the interview room. I cried; I could not help it. I know the opportunity with Morgan Stanley was gone.
Lessen: know you stuff. Every line on your resume could be a story. If you could not explain something, it means you are not technically strong or you are not honest.
Interview with Salomon Smith Barney (SSB). It was with the capital markets group – my dream job. The interview went well (I thought, because nothing went wrong). I was waiting for the feedback. My Indian friend also participated the interview. He told me that he got the notice for on-site interview the second day after the on-campus one. He was from a chemical engineering major, which has nothing to do with finance. I have so many years’ experiences in finance. What went wrong? When he was packing for the on-site interview, I got an email from the human resource representative at SSB. I got rejected. As always, the reason for rejection was that they had found better candidates. I was so confused and I could not help calling the vice president who interviewed me. He said, “you are definitely a strong candidate, but you might not have strong computer programming skills as required. We need people to do some computer modeling work.” I was so emotional. I told him, “I have very strong skills in programming. I used to develop financial models overcoming the deficiencies of the Black-Sholes model using C++, MATLAB, Guass…….” He was probably convinced and told me he would discuss with the HR people. I sent him a follow-up email, with a copy of the abstract of my master thesis in financial modeling. Several days later, I got rejected again. I doubted whether he ever discussed with HR people, because if he made a decision to bring me back, it means he made a mistake of not brining me in the first time.
Lesson: I did not truly understand what he was looking for, so I was not able to sell my skills within the 30 minutes interview.
Interview with Black Rock. First of all, I really liked that position. The interviewer asked me why I was interested in Black Rock. I had my one-minute introduction. I mentioned I had strong skills in IT, good personality, and strong interest in IT type of jobs in the banking environment. Then he said, “well, I am a VP in the marketing and accounting department. I can refer you to the IT department.” Oh, my God. I wanted to cry, but I did not have tears. Apparently, I did not get the second round. I was too eager to sell myself and express my interest, but it was the wrong target.
Lessen: If you are not sure what kind of persons they are looking for, ask them. The question I always ask is “could you please tell me what kind of people are you looking for?” After they answered, I would say, “I am exactly the type of person.” Then I would sell myself from three perspectives: technical, personality, strong enthusiasm toward the company and industry and even the group.”
Interviews with the Hull Group. As time went on, my interview skills increased a lot, as well as my technical skills. The Hull Group was also my dream job. It is an equity-trading firm based in Chicago and became a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs in late 1990s. I had two round on-campus interviews with two different groups. The equity-trading group selected me for the on-site interview. I was so scared; it was my first on-site interview and it was already December 2001. Due to some miscommunication with the HR people, my interview was postponed. One day The Hull Group gave me a phone call, telling me that they had to give me another round of phone interview before they could bring me in for the on-site interview. We did it. It was not bad, although I was scared to death, as always. A lot of technical and behavior questions.
The on-site interview started at 9:00 am and finished at 6:00 pm with a one-hour lunch. I met almost 10 people in the morning. They threw all kinds of questions to me – technical, personal, case study, and anything they could think of. In the afternoon, they wanted to test my C++ programming skills. Tell you the truth, I never took a course in C++; I studied chapters in “How to programming in C++” before I came to the interview. Thank God, all the questions were multiple choices, so at least I could guess. It took me almost 2 hours in the exam. I guess I did well, because I got to meet the head of the group after all the scheduled interviews. The guy looked very nice. He said I did very well. He asked me several simple questions such as “what is the most unforgettable experience in the United States?”, “how do you like the job?” I answered and I thought I did well. Several days later, I got a call from the Hull Group telling me that they could not decided and had to give me a phone interview again. “My God.” I though, “Just tell me, yes or not – why are you torturing me?” Several days later, I had a phone interview with four people from the group – all scenario questions. I waited for a long time for the final decision. It was a “NO.”
Later in the spring semester, the head came to the campus for summer intern interviews. I waited for almost an hour to get the chance to talk with him. He still remembered me. He told me, “The job market is really tough. It if were last year, we would definitely give you the offer. A lot of people want to go to New York, so they reject the offers from our group, but this year, none of them. You did very well, but you had to be yourself. From your answers, I could no tell what kind of person you are. You gave me the impression of memorizing what you have prepared.” At that time, I was already an expert in interviews. I talked with him and he agreed to give me a chance to interview with the technology group at Goldman in New York. It was already March 2002. I did very well in the interview and got the internship opportunities from three groups within Goldman.
Lessen: Be yourself. Never neglect the important the behavior questions! They could kill you just because simple questions like “what was the most unforgettable experience.”
Indian friends taught me how to stand out during interviews. I have to tell you that this Indian guy is very smart. Although a lot of Chinese classmates did not like him, he was one of the strongest. He knew a lot of tricks on how to draw people’s attention and how to lead an interview. He said before each interview, he would search the Internet for latest news related to that company. He succeeded the on-campus interview with Citi Group because he asked questions that distinguished him from other candidates. (Isn’t it amazing that he knew nothing about Finance, but always got pre-selection, and always got on-site interviews?) He asked the woman who interviewed him, “I got to know that there was a big merger and acquisition between Company A and Group B in your company, which has a big impact in the … market. Could you please give some comments…?” The woman said, “wow, I even do not know that, so I can not give any comments. I need to go back and check. But this is very good.” He got the on-site interview, but another classmate from Singapore who had three years’ experiences in banking industry did not. I once had an interview at a big consulting firm. I was scheduled to meet 15 people the whole day. After the morning session, I felt that they had a lot of concerns about my writing and communication skills. In the afternoon, my first interview with the partner went well. I mentioned an articled he published on the company’s website and showed strong interests. He smiled and gave me some comments. As always, I asked him what kind of people they were looking for. He smiled and said, “we are looking for people just like yourself who are smart, intelligent, and enthusiastic.” I think it is probably because of him that the company did not kill me in the first round.
Lessen: Small things make you stand out among candidates. Small conversations with key people make a lot of difference. Talk with people who are experts in interviews and learn from them. Don’t complain or just simply admire other people. Try to understand what the hell makes difference between you and them.If it is communication, learn English; if it is technical, do your homework. Remember, we are smart Chinese.
There are so many stories I could share. Most important things: to be proactive, be enthusiastic, be technically strong, and to make sure they like you when you answer behavior questions. At the end of the semester, although I did not land any jobs, I already prepared almost 20 pages of interview questions. I wrote the answers to each question, rewrote them for each interview. I started to understand what my Indian friends meant when he said, “you have to learn how to lead the interviewer.” It is an art. If you can master the art of interviews, you will land any jobs.
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