事情就是这样，在你拼命努力争取得到的时候往往会收获失望，在你最没有准备的时候往往能峰回路转。比如结婚后曾经的无休止的争吵。在筋疲力尽的时候，突然有一天发现两人都已成熟，突然发现更能理解对方，突然发现以为无解的问题有了最优解。又比如这次的暑期寻实习计。发了好多简历都石沉大海，还有两次极失败的面试经历，本来觉得再无希望的时候，开始准备settle down在学校安心教书的时候，突然收到了较理想的offer，那时的高兴才让我明白自己心里原来这样在乎这件事情。在自信心需要boost的时候，在经济上需要保障的时候，在想明白一些问题准备开始一些改变的时候，这无疑是一针最好的兴奋剂。

现在回想整个过程，发现有很多感谢不得不说。首先是偶的老婆了，没有她一直的鼓励，没有她连续两次电话面试前的模拟，没有她当初看起来那么harsh到mean的挑刺儿，我不可能取得面试的成功。最牛X的是她对我一直以来的信任，甚至在我这个自恋狂都放弃希望的时候，她还是那么的肯定；然后在我拿到offer欣喜若狂的时候，老婆还是平静如水的冷静。难道，难道，她真的比我那个啥，成熟？然后是偶的老板，本来都跟他说暑假留校帮他干活了，现在又反悔，老板还是一如既往的支持，现在欠他一个人情，将来一定，不，从暑假开始，一定作出成绩来补偿他！当然还有关心我的各届朋友了，Steve的美意被我浪费，再说一声sorry了；毛毛老婆给偶不厌其烦的指导，谢了；yy夫妇，利芳准夫妇的鼓励，改天直接在饭桌上报答了，呵呵。至于强仔，跟新女朋友请我吃饭前，哼。

现在总结一下两次面试的面经，以饷读者。

第一轮是个statistician.

Q: Most creative thing;

A: Using a geometric method solving an algebraic problem in the College Entrance Exam, ended 4^th in 200, 000 examinees.

Q: Most satisfying thing;

A: Writing my own paper.

Q: Most challenging thing;

A: Consulting courses. Got a C for the first Semester and A for the second Semester.

Q: Something showing leadership;

A: Captain of college basketball team.

Q: How did you get to know Lubrizol;

A: To tell you the truth, I have been in U.S. for a relatively short time and I only heard of Lubrizol from Professor James Rosenberg. However, when I googled it and found out an amazing fact that Lubrizol is doing big business in China. I want to work for an international company upon receiving my Ph.D. diploma to be closer for my family.

第二轮是跟manager.

Q: Your strongest field in statistics;

A: Have to go with my research topic, dimension reduction. Traditional dimension reduction techniques relies heavily on the assumption of elliptical contour distribution of predictor X. My research shows that this is not necessarily the case. blar blar blar  

Q: Most challenging thing in your life;

A: Getting married. You have to be yourself, but can not be yourself too much.

Q: Tell me something about your internship at FDA;

A: When pharmaceutical companies submit a new drug to FDA, we have to worry about two aspects: efficacy and safety. My boss at FDA is trying to apply a new survival model for checking safety. My work there is to preprocess the data in SAS and transform them to certain form for later time-to-event data analysis.

Q: Does you work ends up with certain kind of written report?

A: My supervisor there hired two summer interns. I am the one in charge of techniques and the other guy wrote reports. However, I wrote lots of recommendations in the statistical courses in my department.

Q: Tell me something about the SAC, the student advisory committee on your CV;

A: It is a student organized committee. We hold meetings every week and discuss details about seminars. We contact talkers, order food and let people know about these events. We also host the Alumni Workshop each year. We made contacts with the alumni, who would come back and give presentation and do recruitment for current students.

Q: How did you end up at Penn State?

A: I always love math and that’s why I chose math as my undergraduate major. In Tsinghua, one of the best universities in China, I built up a solid background of mathematics. Later, it is the statistical courses like stochastic processes and mathematical statistics that pique my interest. I realized that instead of pure math, I wanted to see the application of mathematics in real life, and I chose statistician as my career. Since US has the best graduate programs and the most brilliant professors, I decided to come to US to further my study. Penn State University has a long history and very strong statistics programs. That’s why I accepted their offer and that’s how I end up here.

Q: Tell me something you learned at data mining:

A: We did linear discriminant analysis first, then QDA and logistic regression. Also CART, the classification tree. All the programming is in MATLAB.

Q: Did you use SAS?

A: I used SAS at FDA and gained experience of data manipulation. We also have lots of statistical courses using SAS to do regression and power analysis.

Q: Have you done mulitivariate splines?

A: I have done multivariate analysis and simple splines, but no experience with mulitivariate splines.

记得的大概就这么多。本来觉得第二轮有点悬，没想到中午打完电话没一会，下午就接到了电话通知offer。反正这次找实习的经历还是学会了挺多东西的，觉得实力运气是一个方面，认真的准备实在太重要了。

这是评自己实力找到的第一份实习工作，呵呵，而且暑假可以在五大湖区玩了。