Happy Leap Day everyone! I hope all the ever-so-young Feb 29th babies are rejoicing at turning a year older. Lucky you, ageing at one quarter the pace. Anyway, the weekend was pretty busy for me. I had my first non-Aso internship, and then I had an exam. So, recaps!

Internship Experience

My internship took place here!

The internship was basically three hours long, which I felt was rather short. Before I came to Japan, I always thought internships were fairly long, one month, six months, one year. I did that one week JC law thing, but I consider that more work experience than internships.

But in Japan, internships are one day, three days, five days. Long internships (more than a month) exist, but they’re quite rare. Though the short time period makes sense if you consider that internships are part of the recruitment process, which has a fixed beginning and ending.

What I did was basically:

– listen to a company explanation
– talk to the employees
– fill in a survey

Not very internship like in my view. I have heard that in other places, they make you do Group Discussions and presentations, but I guess because this was short, they skipped it.

Ok, so takeaways:

I think the people here are interesting. They’re definitely people I’d like to work with, and the job has a high degree of freedom that I like. For example, one of the employees got 10 offers from companies during his shukatsu season. Turns out it was a strategy to unsettle the other applicants at his dream company. I thought it was a clever tactic to take, even if I won’t be doing it.

That said, the industry doesn’t interest me (I was looking at their IT infrastructure and construction sections, but it seems like they don’t do much in the way of Industry 4.0), and despite their increased interest in overseas expansion, that’s more through M&A than through sending employees overseas.

But all in all, I think this is a company I will consider applying too. They seem quite Japanese (if that makes sense), and it will be a challenge for me. Especially since they only accept one in two hundred applicants.

Oh, and one more thing that I noticed.  In the beginning, the speaker welcomed us and told us that he hoped the internship helped us with our job hunting. This is actually quite common, I feel.

Even at the game company, they talked about the primary interview in a ‘we hope it helps you in your job hunt’ kind of way. I guess even though they are technically on the hunt for talent, they have to make it seem like they’re helping us.

Ok, I don’t know if this was interesting. Just something I noticed.

Accounting Exam

My accounting exam was depressing. I was never good at accounting (in Japan. I wasn’t that terrible when I was in Singapore), so I didn’t have much confidence going in.

It was actually an eventful exam. First, the questions weren’t what I expected. Especially the last one, which was different from the practice papers. But I don’t know how one company was so fast, when I left the exam hall, they were handing out the answers! Although it was only the first question, and it seems like I got 12/20 for the first one, which is a failing grade. I did say it was depressing.

Second eventful thing involved my calculator (of course). The first time I took the exam, my calculator was taped up, but apart from that it was fine. So I brought in my GDC, because I’m used to it, and halfway through, the proctor comes and tells me my calculator is forbidden! I was so worried that they were going to disqualify me, but they just took it away and gave me another one. That was such a close call.

Anyway, job applications open from tomorrow onwards, and I have a few seminars coming up. So I’ll be blogging about that, and I don’t know, are there any topics you’d like me to talk about? I know I ranted on creativity and messiness on my Dayre the other day, but I don’t know how many people would be interested in random topics like that.