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Essays

Live Search is Live!

    In case you haven’t heard, Live Search is now officially live and getting attention. Jeremy Zawodny did a test-drive and Businessweek had a favorable review on the Live Search experience. Ada Chen

    The End of Cheap Russian Music

      AllOfMp3.com may be reaching the end of its days with a new Russian law in place. Uh oh! I’ve become more and more reluctant to adopt products and services from smaller companies because in all likelihood they will have dramatic changes or not be able to stick around. A few that I love and use regularly are Pandora (music), Meebo (web-based IM), and Wikispaces. To reference my last post about Facebook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told everyone to calm down and breathe. I agree with how it’s not a big deal (but still don’t like it), but what?! React to user… Read More »The End of Cheap Russian Music

      Car Purchases in the context of Negotiation Class

        My summer quarter at the University of Washington ends this Friday, and I’m registering only a sense of relief. Despite the pleasure of easily getting very good grades (they give extra credit?!) and the satisfaction of rounding off a classical studies minor, I’m pretty tired of the school routine. Part of it is due to the utter incompatibility of my coursework (history, geology, etymology) with my immediate future, but also I’m missing all the friends at Penn that make college fun. So this weekend I bought my first car, and did most of the negotiation myself. It was actually an… Read More »Car Purchases in the context of Negotiation Class

        How Often Do You Use These Google Products?

          Well, Philipp Lenssen has a survey to find out. I was really surprised that a) there are so many google products out there, b) I have heard of maybe 2/3rds of them, and c) I’m not alone in not using most of the ones I do know about. Ada Chen

          My Microsoft Interview for Search Marketing Specialist

            One of the things I’m working on for this blog is to write posts that address my own personal FAQs — questions that people always ask me and I end up having to answer repeatedly. Now I’ve come up with the fabulous solution: I’ll just point them at my blog! At Penn, one of the best resources for interview advice is fellow classmates that have interviewed and I have already given advice and helped several friends prep (as well as having been given advice to). 🙂 My Interview at Microsoft I interviewed for Microsoft as a college hire in early October/December 2005. I… Read More »My Microsoft Interview for Search Marketing Specialist

            Paralysis By Too Many Choices

              I really hate the decision-making process. Lately I feel like I’m in a state of paralysis due to inability to pick anything, because there’s too many choices to deal with and I’m afraid that somehow I will make the wrong one. In a Consumer Behavior class I took last year with Professor Small, one of our course readings was a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. It had many interesting insights, but the primary takeaway of the book is that we as consumers are overburdened with too many choices. The ensuing result is… Read More »Paralysis By Too Many Choices

              How to Prepare for an Interview

                After going through full-time recruiting at Wharton last fall, I went through 20+ behavioral interviews between different companies. Not a lot by Penn standards, but I got to final rounds on all but one. Primarily, human resource and tech consulting, and then of course Microsoft. 🙂 Behavioral interviews are interviews operating on the belief that past behavior accurately predicts future behavior, and the questions typically ask for examples. They tend to lead off with: “Describe a situation when…”, “Tell me about an instance when…”, “Have you ever had to do X? How did you do it?” Many of the interviews I… Read More »How to Prepare for an Interview