Authenticity, Job Search and Hong Kong

On Authenticity:

Lately and even not so lately, I've been thinking about authenticity. What does it mean to be an authentic and genuine person? I think through my work as a residence advisor and conversations with other residence advisors, I have heard about these stories of 'fake' advisors. These are advisors who act one way around their residents or around residents in general and then act another way to their friends or even after they are no longer a residence advisor.

That really got me thinking about whether I put out a genuine attitude to my residents - did I act one way around my residents and then act another way after I was no longer required by my job to be nice to my residents? I certainly didn't think it was that way but it's always hard to tell when you're involved in something to make a very clear and unbiased objective conclusion from all the facts that you think of and present to yourself. I also got to thinking about my friends and the new people I meet; do I act the same around everyone that I meet?

That's when I realized that I certainly do try my best to act the same way around all my friends. Given that most of my friends know me as a fairly nice, funny and somewhat witty person, I feel that I do act like my true self around most of the people I meet.

Why this authenticity stuff really got to me lately was because over the summer, I had befriended many people (at least I thought I did). For some reason, and this is only my intuition talking, which by the way is quite accurate most of the time, I feel that sometimes we are 'forced' into friendships because of work or mutual friends and such. It is a weird feeling to think that you are friends and then once that mutual thing that brought you two together is gone, your friendship somehow disappears. It is especially weird to be the only person to think that you are still friends. As I was saying, over the summer, I was talking to a friend about how I had befriended some of these people and my friend said that even though they knew one of my friends, they did not feel like my new friend was a genuine person. This was not based on brief encounters but rather, extended observations through my new friend's work and behavior towards others. I usually don't take these with too much weight and I honestly gave my new friend a chance to prove themselves. Anyway, this is fairly vague but I think I have my answer.


On job searching:

These past few weeks, I have been looking for job opportunities in the technical industry, mainly of the entry-level / new graduate type. Suffice to say, it is difficult. I'm not really sure whether its because of the recession, my resume / cover letter / qualifications, or even if I'm off the hiring cycle but maybe it's even a combination of all 3. I really wish there were some dedicated sites that told new graduates which companies hire new graduates, which companies have leadership development programs (for those on the prowl: Bell, Telus, General Electric, Deloitte are to name a few) and although I have found a few (again, eluta, collegegrad.com, collegerecruiter.com, aftercollege.com), a lot of the jobs I'm applying to I haven't heard back from. It's also a bit disheartening to hear back from the companies you did coop with and get rejected. It really gets me thinking about whether its because of my job application or because of my job performance that I was rejected at those companies (and I guess there's an outside chance it could be the recession). Anyway, just a few of my thoughts about job search right now - I'll continue looking and hopefully I'll be able to find one soon to start in January. I'm really itching to start full-time work somewhere so that I can bring in some new ideas and bring about some sort of positive change in the world.


About Hong Kong:

Very recently, my mom told me that she heard that my grandma was not feeling very well and with that being the case, my mom booked for herself and me, two tickets to Hong Kong for 2 weeks to visit my grandma. While I do enjoy traveling, I thought about the awful 15 hour flight and what I have to do to prepare myself. As I hear after the ticket booking, we will be arriving in Hong Kong at around 7 pm - this means that in order to adjust to the jet lag, I would have to stay up at least 10 hours in the latter part of the flight. It might be possible to sleep the first half of the flight and just stay up for the later half but I'm not too sure.

The great thing about Hong Kong is that its such a shopping haven - the first time I went, I don't think I really did that much shopping apart from clothing and I plan to do some more clothing shopping when I head back (Giordano, G2000 and Esprit come to mind). We may also book a tour to head to another Asian country but since we will be booking that in Hong Kong, I will be learning more about that later.