My First Interview for Accenture

I just received an e-mail, on Friday October 13th, confirming that I will have an interview with Accenture next Friday. I’m off to study and get ready now. Wish me luck!

Accenture’s logo in a hallway
I received my first e-mail confirming my interview with Accenture, after applying online, about a week ago. Ever since the e-mail, I have been reading news and studying the company’s history for this interview a little bit everyday.

I think one of the best to prepare for an interview like this is to know the company well enough to have an intelligent conversation with your interviewee. That’s especially true in the first round interviews of Accenture, since they focus more on the reasons why you would want to work with them and where you see yourself in the company years from now. So, yes, the best way to know that is to know the company a little more. My idea to study the company was to follow Google Finance’s RSS feed and read any news that came out on Accenture. Here is a brief list of the latest news (You have to have Javascript enabled to see this):

So anyways, here are some details on my first interview with them. I walked in the fifth floor of the Brown Building at McGill and was welcomed by three representatives of the Montreal office. They were really nice and we had a little chat about Accenture and other mathematical problems, which was a really interesting problem that I haven’t managed to solve yet, but that’s beside my point here. The actual interview took place in another room, and so my interviewer took me to that room at which point we started discussing some of my academic achievements right away. The interview was basically a get-to-know-me sort of interview and the questions were separated into four categories: Human Resources, Academic achievements, Life in general (extra curricular activities, etc), and Accenture-related questions. The first part is simply to know my geographical preferences (Would I prefer Montreal, Toronto, etc) and whether I can work in Canada.

I don’t want to go into the specifics of what the questions were, but they were pretty simple questions to get to know me. It was actually very interesting to talk with the interviewer and to get to know the company a little better. I think it would be really interesting to work there. There was also some time for me to ask questions about the job and the life that you can expect to have with a job from Accenture, which sounded reasonably exciting!

At the end of the interview, I had time to chat with the three representatives and is where I learned the most about Accenture. I also learned that the next interviews will be held next Friday, October 20th. I will know if I get the second interview or not on Monday. So stay tuned.

Don’t hesitate to leave a little comment here to share with us your experience at interviewing with Accenture. I may even have some words of advice to give you. Meanwhile, here is the picture of the stock for the past two years at Accenture. I find it pretty interesting and revealing to look at the price of the stock of a company.

Last two years at Accenture

Booking the McGill Chapel

McGill Roddick Gates at Night by Zalgon, on Flickr

After going through the long process of weighing pros and cons from both the McGill Chapel and the St-Lambert United Church, we have finally made our mind. It was a long and difficult process because they both had advantages to offer. But in the end, it was our relationship’s history that made the difference.

It would be rude to write about this and fail to mention the advantages of both places so that you see what sort of dilemma we were facing. Hopefully, you will agree and, more importantly, enjoy our decision. First of all, the St-Lambert United Church is very close to the Montreal Country Club, the reception hall, and the apartment in Greenfield Park. This was a good thing, for obvious reasons. Plus, the task of parking 40 cars around the church would be way easier in St-Lambert than in downtown Montreal during the Jazz Festival… Yes. For those of you coming from out of town, you might be able to enjoy a week of very good Jazz during the Montreal Jazz Festival. Finally, the church itself looks really nice and the outside of the church has a stunning landscape installation.

Birks Building at McGill - McGill’s Chapel Even though there were many pros for the St-Lambert church, the lack of personal connection with the church was the major con. That is why we had such a hard time deciding on the location. We had previously thought of the McGill Chapel, which is in the Birks Building where Bonnie completed both her degrees, but never actually considered it because of the obvious parking and traffic problems. Personally, I think that the main reason the McGill Chapel is the best choice is it is a much better representation of Bonnie and me as a couple and of the history between us. Not to mention that the McGill Campus is a beautiful haven in downtown Montreal, when there are no students swarming around that is. There are still a couple of technical problems that we might have to deal with, but the decision has been made as of last Wednesday. We booked the McGill Chapel. It will be a pleasure to welcome both our families to McGill and finally be able to show them where we have been studying for the past 6 years or so.

The photo of the McGill Roddick Gate at night during winter is a modified version of the original work of zalgon. It was taken from his flickr account which you can visit by following the link I provided.

ALA: Long Live the Q Tag

I must redirect anybody interested in learning more on how to render the Q tag correctly for IE/Win users to the new A List Apart article by Stacey Cordoni. Unfortunately, IE/Win does not yet support the Q tag and is making hard for developers, who wants to keep their web site accessible to screen readers, to use it. As usual, the article is precise, concise, and very interesting. So yes, “Long Live the Q Tag”!

Welcome IE7: My first customer.

Hey! You there. With the sup’d up browser. Yes, yes. The IE7. Welcome to my humble website. I hope the website is looking super for you. Well. That’s it for now. I’ll be monitoring you though… hope you come back! Oh, and don’t be shy to let us know if anything looks baaaadd around here.

Google Analytics showing my first IE7 customer

In all seriousness though. I am glad to see that there are some people running IE7 already out there. I mean, I know the RC has been out for a while, it’s been out since August 24 2006, but this means we should be getting feedback from the users very soon. I’m excited to know how much ground they have covered with this release. The sure have been working real hard on their CSS support, the CSS 2.1 specs that is.

Today’s Wallpaper: HicksDesign

HicksDesign: Design is just making things line up

There is a bit of a story behind this wallpaper. I found it through a post by Veerle entitled Design is Just Owning a Clip Art Gallery. I found it funny and saw that it was inspired by HicksDesign’s brilliant wallpaper shown above. Please, visit his website to download the proper wallpaper as I have resized it here to look better on the website. Enjoy!

© Copyright Bonuel Photography - Theme by Pexeto