[16] Do you cast a wide net even when trying to get close to professors?
The library's basement level is a place similar to a Food Republic. While the food isn't as elaborate as student cafeterias like Nelson, it's inexpensive, filling, and filling, perfect for those who've neglected eating and sleeping. Liang Zhiyao ordered a bowl of Vietnamese locomotive pho and waited patiently for a few minutes. When it arrived, steaming hot, she saw Tan Xu enjoying a bowl of Mexican Grill, a dish from one of the city's ubiquitous chains. The bowl consisted of chicken breast, various vegetables, avocado, and quinoa. It was quite dull. Another person who didn't understand the joys of refined carbohydrates. She hadn't always been obsessed with staple foods, but in recent months, she'd gradually discovered that they were essential for manual laborers. For example, she'd skipped a few mouthfuls of rice after work today, so she'd starved herself early in the afternoon to avoid the awkwardness of her stomach rumbling in front of him. Seeing her concentrating on the food, Tan Xu suddenly remembered the conversation they had on the terrace of Liu Siyan's house last time, and asked her: "Is this the 'safe choice' you mentioned before? You order the same dish every time." He asked without any context, but Liang Zhiyao quickly understood: "I guess so. I always ordered this when I came here to eat. I only changed my taste during the end of the semester when I often hang out in the library." "Then if you don't consider whether it will be a bad choice, what would you most like to order?" "Hmm..." She looked at the counters in the distance and thought for a long time: "Probably the Hell Spicy Ramen? Actually, I can't eat spicy food very well, but it is said that the American Hell Spicy Ramen is very watery, and it is at the novice village level. I am very tempted every time I see that picture, but in the end, I haven't tried it since my freshman year." "You haven't tried it for two years?" He was incredulous. "You could call it a personality weakness," she put down her chopsticks. "Even though eating the same thing every time in the library is boring, people don't go to the library every day. Similarly, we don't go to the same building for class every day, or go to the supermarket every day for a big shopping trip. So, isn't it enough to have a safe option in every place? On a particular day, I'll go to a specific place, eat a specific food, and find a certain satisfaction." In the end, it was just the "little happiness" that's been trending these past few years. Since everyone's gravitating towards it, she's just taken her aversion to uncertainty to an extreme, so it's no big deal. Tan Xu didn't comment on her preference, just smiled and said, "Then we're definitely at opposite ends of the spectrum. Even if I occasionally order the same Grill, I always change the meat." After talking about food, the topic finally turned to...
The basement floor of the library is a place similar to Food Republic. The food is not as exquisite as that of student cafeterias like Nelson, but it is cheap, delicious, and filling. It is specially designed for students who forget to eat and sleep to quickly replenish their energy.
Liang Zhiyao bought a bowl of Vietnamese locomotive pho and waited patiently for a few minutes. When it was brought to the table steaming hot, he saw Tan Xu eating a bowl of Mexican Grill, a chain that was everywhere in the city. The bowl was filled with chicken breast, various vegetables, avocado and quinoa, which looked very boring.
Another person who doesn't understand the joy of refined carbohydrates.
She hadn't been so obsessed with staple foods before, but in recent months she'd gradually discovered that they were essential for manual laborers. For example, if she skipped a few mouthfuls of rice after work today, she'd go hungry early in the afternoon to avoid making embarrassing stomach rumblings in front of others.
Seeing her concentrating on the food, Tan Xu suddenly remembered their last conversation on Liu Siyan's terrace and asked her, "Is this what you called a 'safe choice'? You always order the same dish."
He asked without any context, but Liang Zhiyao quickly understood: "I guess so. I used to order this when I came here to eat. Only when I'm in the library a lot during the end of the semester will I change things up."
"If you don't consider whether you might step on a landmine, what would you most like to order?"
"Hmm..." She stared at the counters in the distance, pondering for a long time. "Maybe it's the Hell Spicy Ramen? Actually, I can't handle spicy food very well, but they say the American version is very watery, like a beginner's version. I'm always tempted by the picture, but in the end, I've put it off since freshman year and still haven't tried it."
"Haven't tasted it in two years?" He couldn't believe it.
"You can call it a character weakness," she put down her chopsticks. "Even though it's boring to eat the same thing every time in the library, people don't go to the library every day. Similarly, they don't go to class in the same building every day, or go to the supermarket every day to do their shopping. So, as long as there's a safe option in every place, isn't that enough? On a certain day, when I go to a certain place, I can eat a certain food and feel a sense of certain satisfaction."
After all, it's nothing more than the "little happiness" that has been popular in recent years. Since the public is also flocking to it, she just makes her dislike of uncertainty more extreme. It's no big deal.
Tan Xu didn't comment on her preference, but simply smiled and said, "Then we are indeed two extremes. Even if I occasionally order the same Grill, I always change the meat."
After talking about food, the topic finally turned to the group assignment of changing from three to two.
She asked tentatively, "Are you familiar with that Jeffrey?"
"Not familiar with him," he shook his head. "He was the one who sat next to me that day and asked me if I wanted to team up."
"Ye Xin told me this isn't the first time he's skipped group discussions. He did it last semester," she said, a little indignantly. "But he always gets indulged, getting good grades even without doing anything. I kind of suspect he deliberately chose Asians for the team, probably thinking we're serious students and good-tempered, so he doesn't have to worry about anything."
This is another long-standing stereotype. In reality, not all Asians or Chinese are good-tempered. It's just that being labeled a "minority" in this land makes them inevitably keep a low profile, adhering to the principle of "less is more," which is a bit sad to think about.
Tan Xu asked directly: "What do you want to do?"
"Then I'll be frank—can we report him?" she said, startlingly. "Of course not in the subtle way of snitching. Americans don't seem to buy into that. We need to write a formal email, addressed to him, with a copy to Ed and the TA, to solemnly protest his absence from the group discussion and urge him to participate in the subsequent division of labor."
She spoke with great vigor at first, but at the end she weakened and asked him, "What do you think...?"
This idea came up on the spur of the moment, but in the end, whether to do it or not, she would still respect the opinion of a third person.
Fortunately, Tan Xu smiled and said, "No problem. I agree that Americans will fall for this. Regardless of the real purpose, on paper it's all about getting the job done."
"If you don't mind, could you help me draft the email? After all, your English is definitely better than mine."
She had just thought that the tone and wording of this passage needed to be carefully considered. Although it was blaming Jeffrey, it could not emphasize accountability too much, and still had to urge him to cooperate.
Before he could answer, she added, "Of course, you can use my email address when you send it. After all, it was me who suggested it. If anything goes wrong, I'll take the blame."
Tan Xu was puzzled: "Why do I need to take the blame?"
"Even though we're victims, some professors seem to think this kind of thing is a sign of poor communication skills," she said. "I might lose points in my impression... But if I don't do anything, I'll just have to swallow this."
"Don't worry about it. Send it through my email," he said, shaking his head. "After I send the email, I'll talk to Ed in person and explain the background to him."
"Huh? Are you familiar with the professor in our department?"
"Yeah, he was the one who introduced me to this internship. What a coincidence, isn't it?" He winked. "So, let me be the bad guy, okay?"
Liang Zhiyao was stunned, shocked and frustrated at the same time.
After all, she was a computer science student. Although her personality meant she wasn't usually overly active, in order to improve her GPA, she often forced herself to actively interact with professors in class, ask extra questions after class, and constantly show up in front of them.
I'd never expected someone with a computer science minor to be more familiar with my professors than I was with them, and even help me with internship recommendations. Is this considered a social talent for finance guys?
She instantly felt awe for Tan Xu, forgetting that she had thought of him as an unlearned business school idiot just half an hour ago. She changed her attitude and humbly asked for advice: "Boss, would you mind sharing how you did this?"
He seemed a little amused by the title. "It's a coincidence, actually. Since the beginning of this semester, I've tried to get close to at least five professors, attending their office hours whenever I can. To my surprise, the four finance professors didn't have any suitable opportunities. Instead, Ed's friend happened to work at an investment bank and was also looking for interns, so I sent my resume to them."
Tan Xu downplayed the issue, but even though Liang Zhiyao didn't know much about finance, he was well aware of the difficulties it faced for non-native Asian undergraduates to find internships in investment banks.
Most of them will have a hard time getting a job after just the resume. Most of their friends are senior executives in investment banks, so it's no surprise that they have a lot of influence. Even so, these people are very careful about their reputation, and if they perform poorly in the interview, they are unlikely to get a job.
Putting all that aside, how many people could actually attend five professors' office hours simultaneously to stay connected from the start? Liang Zhiyao wondered if even if his time wasn't occupied as much as it was this semester, he wouldn't have been able to muster the courage, let alone stick to it every week.
"I admire you so much! It really is true that the harder you work, the luckier you get."
She sincerely praised him, savoring his story, and then realized belatedly that he had been tickled. "No—even when trying to get close to the professor, you used this wide-ranging, Neptune-style approach?"
Just like in relationships between men and women.
Tan Xu accurately noticed her grammatical error and asked, "Why '也'?"
Once again, too much talk leads to mistakes. This time, Liang Zhiyao was much calmer. He immediately and calmly searched for a reasonable explanation and began to talk nonsense: "Because... most people only send their resumes to the website by themselves, which is casting a wide net. When looking for a big boss to recommend them, they usually look for one person individually."
It was a pretty good explanation. Tan Xu was fooled by it and laughed after hearing it. "Later, send out a few dozen Coffee Chat invitations on LinkedIn and see how many people respond. Then you'll know whether to cast a wide net. Sometimes these things really are a numbers game."
Coffee Chat is a term that has only become popular in recent years. It basically means that young job seekers send private messages on social networking sites to professionals they don’t know but who are in the same circle as them, inviting them to have a quick chat over a cup of coffee. The purpose is to establish a connection while selling their resume to see if they can get relevant internal referral opportunities.
When Liang Zhiyao first heard about this kind of trickery, he was deeply impressed by the inability of social anxiety to survive in this country. They say China is a society based on personal connections, but in reality, Americans play it even more, and the ivory tower is just a microcosm.
When she was looking for a summer internship during her sophomore year, she had applied to numerous jobs on her own and never tried any other methods. Thinking about the internships she had applied for in the past few months but all of them fell through, she couldn't help but feel the urge to try new tricks.
From this perspective, there is no harm in making friends with a finance man.
To save money, she had rarely eaten out in the past few months, and today was an exception. But after a meal, she not only decided how to deal with her teammates who were tanking, but also heard some job hunting tips, which was well worth the price of admission.
"The meeting room time should be up soon," Tan Xu put away the tray. "We've almost finished our discussion. How about we go study somewhere else together?"
“…Oh, okay.”
He'd supposedly been studying, but Liang Zhiyao had already spent nearly 12 hours of physical and mental work today, exhausted beyond belief. His coding efficiency was low. He was debating whether to head home early for some sleep when he suddenly remembered the LinkedIn networking topic they'd just discussed, and his spirits perked up.
Social networks for commercial purposes have made the six degrees of separation theory concrete. As long as you put in the effort, you can always find intricate connections with your target audience.
She entered keywords like "software engineer" into the search box and added the filter criteria of their school, and several pages of alumni lists popped up in minutes.
The rest of the work was similar to sending mass ads, except the product being sold became himself. Liang Zhiyao harassed his target one by one, sorting from the number of mutual friends to the fewest, sending 50 private messages in one go.
After pressing Enter, the website popped up a dialog box of "You may also know..." to recommend friends to her. Counting from the top of the list, the third one was none other than Tan Xu, who was studying opposite her at the moment.
Big data is indeed powerful. She found it interesting and clicked Connect, but she didn't expect the friend invitation to be pushed so quickly that a message popped up on the other party's phone on the table.
He glanced sideways at his phone screen, not realizing, "...Are you adding me on LinkedIn?"
"Yeah, I'm learning how to be Aquaman," she joked, turning the computer screen to show him. "Isn't it said to cast a wide net? I just sent 50 private messages to test the waters."
He laughed and said, "Then remember to share the statistics after a week. Mine is dismal, with a response rate of only 4%."
4% means only two people out of 50 responded. She was deeply shocked and muttered to herself, "This is really a numbers game!" It sounded like she might as well use that hour to attend office hours and get close to the professor.
She then drew inferences: "And a reply doesn't equal a referral, and a referral doesn't equal an offer. With this conversion rate, if we really want to succeed, wouldn't we have to send 500 emails?"
“I don’t know if 500 private messages can be converted into offers,” he said, stifling a laugh, “but you’ll probably get your account banned by the platform.”
Author's Note
Reversible light path
author
07-09
People always admire the strong. Tan Gou himself was only interested in the heroine because he was abused while playing basketball. When it was his turn, he actually thought that he could just rely on his looks and tricks. It was really unrealistic:)
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