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A Job |
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Graduation date was approaching, but unlike most of
my classmates, I
hadn't even written up my resume. Some of my friends had received offers
from big firms like Nortel or IBM ever since the beginning of Fall term.
When my friends were already planning for their
graduation trips to Europe, I began to worry about my living.
Kingston was a place to study but not a place to work. If I still hadn't
found a job somewhere else, I'd have to pack my stuff and move back to
Vancouver. I really didn't want to move back to Vancouver because job
market was even smaller over there, and indeed I didn't have many positive
impressions about the city. When I felt so lost and didn't see any direction for my life, I prayed to God, "Father, please show me the way. I don't know how to plan my career as ambitious as my classmates, but Father, please plan for me because your plan is the best". In my faculty, I was well-known to be a problem student among professors and TAs. I wasn't like the good student who would attend the 8:30am lecture and had group discussion in the library before handing in the assignments. If you want to picture how I was like, here were the typical senerios: one time I met the professor on the hallway before the class, he handed my lab report back to me before going inside the lecture hall, and said, "I assume you are not coming to my class, so here's your lab report." Likewise another time I met a different professor on the hallway after the class, he handed me his lecture notes and said, "I assume you didn't go to my class, so here's the lecture notes. Remember to put it back to the library as references after you photocopy them." Fortunately, I still had some good points. Although I didn't invest much time in attending classes or studying for marks, I did enjoy labs and projects. While my classmates would invest most of their time to prepare for exams, I'd spend the time to do labs and projects which didn't even count much towards the final grades. One day, I was alone in the fourth year project lab trying to figure out how to fix a problem in our equipment setting. In fact, by this time, my fellow classmates were no longer coming to the lab because they heard that their marks for the final project were already above 80% no matter if they would actually finish it or not, so of course they would rather use the rest of the time to study for the final exams. There, I met one of the TAs. He asked if I'm interested to work in the lab after I graduate, and he told me to give him my resume, so he could hand that to the professor. Since I still hadn't started job hunting at all, I immediately typed up a resume that night. The next day, this TA asked me for my resume again, so I gave him the freshly written resume. The news of the job opportunity had spreaded to other classmates, and many of them were eager to get the job too because it would be a good stepping stone. One day I met this TA again and he asked me if I'd already found another job in the States. I was surprised because I knew for sure I just typed up the resume couple days ago, and how would I be possibily given offers if I hadn't even applied for a job. Then he told me, a classmate, who was one of my "friends", told him that I no longer wanted this job because I found a job in the States, and she gave the TA her own resume. I explained to the TA that it wasn't true, and he immediately brought me to the professor's office for interview and thus I got the offer. So I stayed in Kingston for four more months as a research assistant. Later, I posted my resume in public, and got some other offers. By coincidence, one of the offers was to work in a large company in the States. Since I'd accepted the offer to work in Ottawa, I wanted to pass this other opportunity to my classmates. Then, I knew this classmate I mentioned above, who still hadn't found any job due to citizenship constraint. I truely believe that it was God's grace but not my own effort that I could get the jobs, so I gave this classmate's contact to the company in the States. God's plan is amazing. -- Do not rely on your own strenght but on God's grace. Ephesians Ch 4:32 "But instead, be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ also forgave you." 1 Corinthians Ch 15: 57-58 "But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! So then, dear brothers and sisters, be firm. Do not be moved! Always be outstanding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord." |
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