Sydney experience part one
So how did it go in Sydney? I'll tell you.
Didn't get much sleep the night before, I dunno if it was because I was hella nervous, taking my sweet time in preparing/practicing stuff, or because there was road works going on outside. I woke up early, really didn't want to get out of bed because I was feeling extremely tired, slept for another 15 minutes then dragged my arse out of bed and into the shower where I tired to get warm (I get extremely cold and sweaty when I am nervous), ended up feeling like I was short of time when I finally got ready, sorta ran downstairs and checked out of the hotel (which was pretty nice) walk up the road to the Hudson offices and was 15 minutes early, great.
So I loitered outside in the nice morning sun, it had been 24 and 26 degrees in Sydney the days I was there, blue skies and warm winds, just beautiful really. I went over a few of the things I thought they would ask me, sipped some water (i was the only thing I could stomach, I just couldn't bring myself to eat breakfast) and then headed inside.
I don't know what it is about hudsons offices, but the 2 the I've been into have the most confusing elevator system, this one consisted of no buttons on the wall to press to call the button, you just have to wait at a particular elevator door for your level and hope that it is coming soon. Met a fellow grad in the elevator, nice guy, got upstairs, walked straight into the reception area, loaded my "confidence" file into my main RAM component of my brain and it was game on.
Got shuffled off into a beautiful room with the most awesome views of Sydney, everyone was very nice except for all the extremely nervous grads (10 of us all up) filling out a ton of paperwork, they gave me that ton of paperwork too, I basically had to write my whole online application out for them again, a bit ridiculous really, although I guess these records are for the hudson people so they can forever hold you on file. One of the stupid questions they asked was "tell us your place of residence for the last 10 years" with full addresses, phone numbers (wtf?) and all that crap, They had like a 4 line box for this, another guy and I pointed out to them that we would have to have about a whole page to fill out that section, so they just made me fill in my last 3 (Still couldn't fit it all in). Stupid.
After paperwork, we got shuffled off into an even bigger and better room with even more awesome views, we then got explained to us the whole day and what we would do, how proud we should be for getting to where we are (this place had over 5000 applications), and how we must all be academically brillant for getting to this stage (I was laughing inside my head on this one, I hardly call scraping together my average brillant, it is seriously bad.), we then had a presentation on what exactly the department of this business was all about and what they actually do, which was really great because I really had no idea what they did day to day, they sort of make everything sound pretty exciting on the website but really give you nothing.
After this we were split into two groups of 5 and put in seperate rooms to do the group assessment, this basically consisted of giving us a business problem and then we have to discuss (or argue) about it and come to a group consensus of what the best course of action to take. This assessment was much larger in content to the one I did last friday, about 3 times as big, so there was a lot of information to take in in the same amount of time, I was doing find in my preparation time until they threw a spanner in the works and told us to look at this other sheet where it gave us a particular role and stance we had to take up on the situation, it was a real bitch because up until that point I was making a case for the opposite decision to the one I was forced to take up, and then I only had about 5 or 10 minutes to formulate my arguements, needless to say that when discussion time came I was not quite ready, all these dudes just went for it (I had all guys in my group) spewing out all the easy crap first and throwing it open to everyone else, about 2/3rds of the way through the discussion I started getting major grillage from two guys out of no where, asking me for my opinion on something totally unrelated to what I was talking about, and the answers I gave couldn't consist of much more than a sentence as the long fluffed questions that gave me were pretty much yes or no questions. I dunno, it all went a bit badly I think. Then we had to give a group presentation which two guys out of our groups said they were going to do but then ended up just introducing the group, the main points of contention and then just blindly threw to me and the other 2 guys for comments on shit whenever they ran out of things to say. I think I did ok in that presentation bit, didn't get to say much but I hope that the assessors see that I was coping with the grillage I was getting and then picking up where the overbearing group members gave up.
Next was the psychometric test, it was exactly the same as a test I did previously, 40 questions in 20 minutes, all "what shape comes next" questions. These tests are designed so people can't finish them I've been told, well this time I finished it with a good 6 or 7 minutes to spare, probably cause I remembered the answers from about over a week ago, if you enjoy puzzles you'll do well on these tests, and trust me, if you've spent the majority of you life playing puzzle games on a computer you are going to do alright! So yeah I finished early and was just staring out the window and the assessor woman, she was looking back at me shocked like, she was motified that someone actually finished early, that or either she was going "omg you must have cheated!>@#$@#", so I was thinking "uh-oh" and then just started going over my answers again, was basically looking at one question which I didn't get and I am CONVINCED there is no way to figure it out, I'm going to have to go and try to find it somewhere so I can show everyone, maybe one of you guys out there will figure it out.
After the test it was behavioural interview time, i've never had one of these face to face so I was a bit nervous, but it ended up being alright, the people were really nice, I had decent answers to all there questions (although I could have tried to punch home some qualities about myself and actions I took which I sort of forgot to do) and they seemed pretty happy by the end of the interview with what I had to say.
Next was preparing for a presentation that each grad had to give to all the business managers, hudson people, the other grads and some other former grad program dudes they got to come in, we were given roughly 30 to 40 minutes to prepare for this which would have been fine if I wasn't constantly interupted by other grads trying to make friendly conversation with me, I mean yeah you gotta be nice but fuck off I am trying to think! I ended up only getting down about 2/3rd of my presentation sorted out before they told us to stop because we were going to have lunch.
I gotta go to a meeting now, so I'll finish this blog later.
Didn't get much sleep the night before, I dunno if it was because I was hella nervous, taking my sweet time in preparing/practicing stuff, or because there was road works going on outside. I woke up early, really didn't want to get out of bed because I was feeling extremely tired, slept for another 15 minutes then dragged my arse out of bed and into the shower where I tired to get warm (I get extremely cold and sweaty when I am nervous), ended up feeling like I was short of time when I finally got ready, sorta ran downstairs and checked out of the hotel (which was pretty nice) walk up the road to the Hudson offices and was 15 minutes early, great.
So I loitered outside in the nice morning sun, it had been 24 and 26 degrees in Sydney the days I was there, blue skies and warm winds, just beautiful really. I went over a few of the things I thought they would ask me, sipped some water (i was the only thing I could stomach, I just couldn't bring myself to eat breakfast) and then headed inside.
I don't know what it is about hudsons offices, but the 2 the I've been into have the most confusing elevator system, this one consisted of no buttons on the wall to press to call the button, you just have to wait at a particular elevator door for your level and hope that it is coming soon. Met a fellow grad in the elevator, nice guy, got upstairs, walked straight into the reception area, loaded my "confidence" file into my main RAM component of my brain and it was game on.
Got shuffled off into a beautiful room with the most awesome views of Sydney, everyone was very nice except for all the extremely nervous grads (10 of us all up) filling out a ton of paperwork, they gave me that ton of paperwork too, I basically had to write my whole online application out for them again, a bit ridiculous really, although I guess these records are for the hudson people so they can forever hold you on file. One of the stupid questions they asked was "tell us your place of residence for the last 10 years" with full addresses, phone numbers (wtf?) and all that crap, They had like a 4 line box for this, another guy and I pointed out to them that we would have to have about a whole page to fill out that section, so they just made me fill in my last 3 (Still couldn't fit it all in). Stupid.
After paperwork, we got shuffled off into an even bigger and better room with even more awesome views, we then got explained to us the whole day and what we would do, how proud we should be for getting to where we are (this place had over 5000 applications), and how we must all be academically brillant for getting to this stage (I was laughing inside my head on this one, I hardly call scraping together my average brillant, it is seriously bad.), we then had a presentation on what exactly the department of this business was all about and what they actually do, which was really great because I really had no idea what they did day to day, they sort of make everything sound pretty exciting on the website but really give you nothing.
After this we were split into two groups of 5 and put in seperate rooms to do the group assessment, this basically consisted of giving us a business problem and then we have to discuss (or argue) about it and come to a group consensus of what the best course of action to take. This assessment was much larger in content to the one I did last friday, about 3 times as big, so there was a lot of information to take in in the same amount of time, I was doing find in my preparation time until they threw a spanner in the works and told us to look at this other sheet where it gave us a particular role and stance we had to take up on the situation, it was a real bitch because up until that point I was making a case for the opposite decision to the one I was forced to take up, and then I only had about 5 or 10 minutes to formulate my arguements, needless to say that when discussion time came I was not quite ready, all these dudes just went for it (I had all guys in my group) spewing out all the easy crap first and throwing it open to everyone else, about 2/3rds of the way through the discussion I started getting major grillage from two guys out of no where, asking me for my opinion on something totally unrelated to what I was talking about, and the answers I gave couldn't consist of much more than a sentence as the long fluffed questions that gave me were pretty much yes or no questions. I dunno, it all went a bit badly I think. Then we had to give a group presentation which two guys out of our groups said they were going to do but then ended up just introducing the group, the main points of contention and then just blindly threw to me and the other 2 guys for comments on shit whenever they ran out of things to say. I think I did ok in that presentation bit, didn't get to say much but I hope that the assessors see that I was coping with the grillage I was getting and then picking up where the overbearing group members gave up.
Next was the psychometric test, it was exactly the same as a test I did previously, 40 questions in 20 minutes, all "what shape comes next" questions. These tests are designed so people can't finish them I've been told, well this time I finished it with a good 6 or 7 minutes to spare, probably cause I remembered the answers from about over a week ago, if you enjoy puzzles you'll do well on these tests, and trust me, if you've spent the majority of you life playing puzzle games on a computer you are going to do alright! So yeah I finished early and was just staring out the window and the assessor woman, she was looking back at me shocked like, she was motified that someone actually finished early, that or either she was going "omg you must have cheated!>@#$@#", so I was thinking "uh-oh" and then just started going over my answers again, was basically looking at one question which I didn't get and I am CONVINCED there is no way to figure it out, I'm going to have to go and try to find it somewhere so I can show everyone, maybe one of you guys out there will figure it out.
After the test it was behavioural interview time, i've never had one of these face to face so I was a bit nervous, but it ended up being alright, the people were really nice, I had decent answers to all there questions (although I could have tried to punch home some qualities about myself and actions I took which I sort of forgot to do) and they seemed pretty happy by the end of the interview with what I had to say.
Next was preparing for a presentation that each grad had to give to all the business managers, hudson people, the other grads and some other former grad program dudes they got to come in, we were given roughly 30 to 40 minutes to prepare for this which would have been fine if I wasn't constantly interupted by other grads trying to make friendly conversation with me, I mean yeah you gotta be nice but fuck off I am trying to think! I ended up only getting down about 2/3rd of my presentation sorted out before they told us to stop because we were going to have lunch.
I gotta go to a meeting now, so I'll finish this blog later.
posted by serp at 12:54 PM
3 Comments:
Ummmmmm, fuck, you're challening astro in the long-post stakes.
Executive summary please.
I thought I recognised the address... yes the Hudson offices are awesome, and the thing with the lifts if you gotta press the buttons in the main lobby and it'll tell you what lift if going to the floor you're after (very strange concept). The views are great too, same kind of view as from my work if you were looking west across Darling Harbour, even better if you were looking east towards the Opera House n stuff.
Most of the time I was facing Circular Quay, still a good view!
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