Answers to Open Questions

Here is my answers to the open questions I have met up to now.

1. Please give an example of a time when you developed a new or different solution to a problem. Why did you think the problem needed a new solution? How did you develop the new solution? What feedback did you receive on how it is working? Please give your answer in English. Thank you.(No more than 300 words.)

In Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), there are some students, whom we call agencies, selling almost everything we students need as part-time job. But, science they always do their business individually, they can't make themselves be trusted by both the students to whom they sell things and the shops from where they buy the things.
So, I, with some friends’ help, made a plan which suggested the College Part-time Job Department building a platform to make the agencies a union, like eBay. In that way, we can make a filter to prove the quality of the agencies joining the platform to make us trusted by the consumers, and as a union, we can talk to the shops much stronger with a big number of consumers in hand to get lower price which can make the consumers trust us more. When the little snowball grows big enough, we can serve the students both the low price and a lot of job positions to get practice and earn some money.
Now, the platform I mentioned, thanks to a lot of friends’ and teachers’ hard work, has been built. We named it www.toogo.cn and I am in charge of the planning department. We started the project in June and it was growing very fast in these four months, and 20 agencies have joined the platform. I believe it will be e-business center of SJTU in a year or two.

2. Please give an example of a career goal that you set yourself. How did you choose the goal that you were aiming towards? What did you do to achieve the goal? How did you feel about working towards the goal? Please give your answer in English. Thank you.(No more than 300 words.)

One career goal of mine is to be a System Architect. Science I major in computer science, I have a lot of classes about programming and software engineering in my list. When I was in my first semester of sophomore, I started to learn Java, and in order to learn it better I read a book named “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” from which I know what the best programmers do, not coding but designing. And science then, to be a System Architect became my goal.
Before I did anything to work towards my goal, I made a plan. Knowing that a System Architect must be an excellent programmer first, I decided to start from the bottom. I took part in the lessons held by Sun Certification & Education Service, learned hard and got the certification of Sun Certified Java Programmer. During the lessons, I was told something about J2EE, where the System Architect servers best. So I changed my plan. Instead of doing some real projects I continued my lessons and became a Sun Certified Web Component Developer. After that, I thought it was right time to have a practice. After seeking day and night for about two months, I became a team-member to build a library management system for a middle school in Shanghai and a volunteer in Shanghai Grid Computing Center to help building their portal.
There are still an amount of things to do on my plan, but I think no matter whether I can achieve my goal or not, I have learned something important from the process, making a plan at first, changing the plan when really needed and executing the plan with full power.

3. Sometimes it is difficult to keep the commitments we make to others. Describe a situation where this happened to you. Why was it difficult? How did you decide what to do? What was the impact of this decision? Please give your answer in English. Thank you.(No more than 300 words.)
This August, we, toogo.cn, decided to make a guide for the all the freshmen, which we named “Start Point”, not only to help them learn more about the campus but also to introduce ourselves to them, and I was in charge of planning the whole project. Considering of the unavailable cost of printing about 7000 copies which has 32 pages each, I decided to sell some pages to the shops around the campus for advertisement. We managed to catch the shop owners’ heart by promised them we could make sure that every freshman would have one copy of our guide and their shops could be known by every freshman at the very time they just entering the campus. Two week later, we got together with 24 agreements in hand and ￥12000 in pocket. Then I handed the project over to the executing team.
The project seemed working smoothly until the day after the delivery day. I was surprised to find that because of the confusing organization of the freshmen, the executing team failed to send out all copies, and about 1/4 freshmen didn’t get the guide.
I decided to keep the commitments. I gathered all the members and all of us went to the dormitories of the freshmen with the left copies. We asked every freshman we met to make sure he or she had a copy. With two night hard working, we sent out all the 7000 copies. Then we dropped in every shop which had bought our pages to explain the situation and ask for their forgiveness.
After this project, we successfully built our faithful image, which helps a lot in future, in both the freshmen and the shops around the campus.

4. Please describe an occasion when you received some feedback? What was the feedback and what was your reaction? Which book impressed you most and why? Which world leader inspired you most and why? Please give your answer in English. Thank you.(No more than 300 words.)
Two weeks after project of the guide for the freshmen I mentioned in the answer of the 3rd question finished, I planned an investigation to get the feedback of the project. We inquired hundreds freshmen about their feeling and advices of the guide. The feedback we got told us that the guide had impressed them and really did some help for them to adapt the campus. But, about 1/3 freshmen said the paper we used to print the guide was too flimsy and the information of the shops around the campus was quite not enough. I understood that the freshmen were eager to know about the shops and I should have sold more pages and got more money to buy better paper. So I started another project to get the information of the shops and put it on our website. In one week, I was told the click number of the information pages was about 1/3 of the total, and we got about ￥6000 income.
The Man Who Changed China written by Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the book which impressed me most. This book tries to counter the Western perception of Jiang Zemin as a dictator of Communist China and emphasizes instead how far Chinese leadership has come since the days of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It changes my viewpoint of leadership and the way to become a chief leader.
Deng Xiaoping is the world leader inspired me most. He realized the importance of developing in the years full of political movements, and successfully made the 1/5 population of the world focus on developing instead of polity. And his spirit of persisting in his work after being up and down for three times inspire me as well.

5. Suppose you have already joined our company, and your supervisor asks you to do many tasks, which are not possible to accomplish before the deadline, how would you handle this situation? (Limit: 400 characters)
I will have a talk with my supervisor fist. Tell him the situation and ask him to give some advices. If it doesn't work, I will turn to my colleagues for help. Inquire about how to work on the tasks more efficient and, if possible, ask them to give me a hand. Then it’s time to fight. I believe that it is attitude that determines everything and impossible is nothing. I will try my best to accomplish the tasks. On the other hand, if I failed at last, I will tell my supervisor what I have done and try to get his understanding.

Open Question

Today, I answered 4 more open question... limited to 400 characters each.... CHARACTERS not WORDS!!!!
How can I describe a complex situation, a confict with others and the result in just no more than 80 words!!!!!!! God Damned it.
Up to now, I have mailed my resume to about 20 company, no feedback, no telphone, no rejection. I don't know I should be happy of not being rejected or be sad of not be interviewed.
Let's just wait and see.
Browsing the 51job.com and the chinaHR.com, I can't find any more company attracts me. Do I value myself too high? Shall I readjust? I don't know.... really don't know.
HSBC's IT deparment asking for a 5 inch photo mailed with the table and I found that I had not been in any photo for about 3 years. My last photo was taken when I was a freshman. What a living I had in the next 3 years? Maybe only the God can tell me.

My Career Blog

This is my new blog. It will focus on recording everything happened, heppening or will happened on my way to find my career goal and to achieve it.
Dr Li from google.com came to SJTU yesterday and I listened his lecture. He introduced us a new way to work in a company, a google way. Every one in google can have 20% free time to do every project he wanna to do, no limit, no demand. That impressed me most. Somthing most terrible to a developer may be the project he is developing is not the one he is interested in, but, in order to survive in the company, he has no choice but to do it. The 20% free time rule can avoid such thing happen. It can helps to keep the developer always doing something they love to do, and doing the things which they don't like to do with pleasure.
What a good idea! What a good way to motivate the employee's emotion to try new project all the time.