Long Time No Blog

I haven't written a post for a week now but it definitely hasn't been due to a lack of things to write, more so the opposite. Last Tuesday I got a call somewhat out of the blue asking if I could do a telephone interview for the next day. It was from the company Accenture where Marlene's uncle (the one who owns our apartment actually) used to work. I had given him my résumé and he'd said he'd pass it on to a former colleague there. I did the phone interview and I thought it went pretty well. The next day they asked for my transcript and a letter of recommendation so I sent my transcript which I had handy and emailed my old boss to get a letter of recommendation. Then on Monday, I was invited to an all-day recruiting event that would take place the next day (yesterday).

On Tuesday, there were about 15 applicants, and we met at the Accenture office in downtown Wien. We took a bus to the airport where we would be spending the whole day. We were given breakfast and an intro speech by a couple higher-ups for the Germany/Austria/Switzerland region. One of the guys was actually from Switzerland so he was extremely difficult to understand in German. Then we were separated into smaller groups to do a case study. We were given a situation that we had to talk through, formulate a plan of action, then give a presentation on our results. That was definitely the most difficult part of the day, so in hindsight I'm glad it happened first. After that we were given lunch and took turns going in for individual face to face interviews. The questions asked of me weren't too difficult but I was too nervous to put together detailed, grammatically correct sentences so I was quite disappointed with my performance.

The rest of the afternoon was just meant to be fun. We got a tour of behind the scenes at the airport so we saw the plane garages where aircraft were being repaired and were almost completely disassembled. We also got to practice flying in true flight simulator used for training actual pilots. That will probably go down as one of the most unique experiences I've had in my life. We had an hour long training beforehand and then we got to try it ourselves where we were able to taxi down the runway, then takeoff and fly around a bit. Then they loaded a landing program and we tried that, but landing was a lot more difficult. We were in the simulator the whole time while the others were flying and could see the same as the pilot so it was pretty scary when one of my group members had a bad landing and the whole cabin shook and the screen was tinted red, indicating we had all died.

After the fun stuff we were taken back to the big meeting room and taken one by one to see who would be receiving job offers. I wasn't one of the lucky ones, so then I had to sit around and wait a while longer for everyone to finish so we could take the bus back to Wien. I wasn't at all surprised to not get a job offer but it was depressing nonetheless. But I'll have to try and put a positive spin on it by thinking about how it was good experience for future interviews, as well as getting to use the flight simulator and getting some Accenture swag.