Jan

30

Late Night Puzzle #3

Personal

Challenging Mathematical Problems With Elementary Solutions, Vol. 1Two hunters A and B set out to hunt ducks. Each of them hits as often as he misses when shooting at ducks. Hunter A shoots at 50 ducks during the hunt and hunter B shoots at 51. What is the probability that B bags more ducks than A?

I’ve come across a couple of very interesting puzzles in the book I am reading at the moment. I’ll try and share some of my favourite ones with you every now and then. Feel free to take a guess at the answer for this puzzle by commenting to the post. I’ll post my answer in a couple of days/weeks. By the way, you should check out this book, it’s full of fun and challenging mathematical problems.

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Feb

20

A quick update and some random thoughts

Personal

I am reading this really funny book at the moment: Micro-serfs. Story of a couple of people working at Microsoft. Having been to Microsoft for interviews and a campus visit, I can totally understand what they are saying and my day interview there makes this book a lot more fun. That and the fact that I am a complete geek inside. Ahhh. Still in the “geek closet” I guess.

While on the subject of interviews. It’s funny how ironic (Is that a Canadian ironic? Not sure anymore, thanks to Alanis…) life can be. I interviewed with Accenture who didn’t feel I had the qualifications and type of personality to work there, and am now working at Nuance (which I love love love by the way!). The irony is that I am working on a project for which Accenture contracted us to do the speech recognition and I wrote a whole report on how to improve their application! Ha ha. Take that Accenture! I love life. Full of surprises.

Other random thoughts. Nuance stock hit the 15$ mark today. I’ve been working hard on Africa World’s website and it is finally coming together. We are looking at a March 1st launch. Long process, but we finally managed to get something done. I’ll be sure to let you guys know when it is online. Bonnie (and I? non, not even… Bonnie just made an amazing list of songs for us) has been working on the music that will play at the wedding, and I’ve been working a little bit on the wedding website (This friday, I will update it, I promise!). My chocolate chip banana cookies just came out of the oven, so I’ve got’s to go. I made them huge… delicious!

Hope all is well everybody tonight. Where ever you are (physically and mentally) when reading this, send me some news some time.

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Oct

28

Saturday Night Puzzle: Birthday Sharing Party

Personal

And we have an right answer! Thanks to both Eddie and John for their right answer. Very well done!

You are at a party with a friend and 30 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend wants to make a wager with you if there are two people that share their birthday date, he will give you 100$, however, you shall give him 100$ if nobody shares their birth date. Would you accept the wager ? Explain why.

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Oct

23

My Second Interview with Accenture

Interview

I didn’t want to say much about this second interview here. However, seeing as my first post on the subject seems to have helped a couple of people out there, I thought I should share a little something for the second round interviews also.

My second interview was with a different person from Accenture, Montreal. He was really nice, but we skipped the chatting from the first interview and dove right into the subject matter: Behaviour, Behaviour, Behaviour. So I will only give you one piece of advice for this second interview: Prepare at least 5 projects from which you remember a large amount of details (because, yes, they will dig really deep!), and be ready to answer a couple of questions using those projects. I also suggest visiting quintcareers.com’s sample behavioural questions to get an idea of the kind of questions you will be asked. You should be able to find all of the information you need in order to do well in behavioral interviews on that website. You should also visit the section on Second Interview Do’s and Don’ts from the same website.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of questions they may ask you. I was asked to “talk about a time you had to talk about the difficulties you were facing in a project”. They asked me a lot of questions about the said project, what was it, why was it difficult, but they also asked me to explain in detail how I was feeling when I was talking to my employer. Needless to say, it was very difficult to remember.

Oh and one last thing. Don’t ever lie about a project. It’s way better to be honest. I told them at one point that I didn’t remember this project in that much detail. They said “no problem, we’ll change question”. After all, they are not there to torture you, they are only there to find out more about you. If you lie, then all they’ll find out about you is that you are a liar… and that would definitively rule out a third round interview! Having said that, I would recommend studying your past five projects you’ve done and try to remember as much details as possible.

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Oct

19

Phone Interview with Nuance

Interview / Personal

The phone interview is officially scheduled for Tuesday October 24th at 20h00. I can’t wait because I have many questions in mind already.

Nuance Communications, Inc Things are advancing fast on my job search so far in October. Since I learned from my friend Jean-Philipe, through our common friend Sylvain, that Nuance Communications is looking for a person with a Mathematical and Programming background to fill in a position as a Speech Scientist, I have been super excited about this opportunity. First, I did some research on the subject and talked with Jean-Philipe about the position. I also read a little bit about the company and the science behind Speech Recognition. I had no idea it was such an interesting field of Mathematical applications. Anyways. Then I sent my Resume and nice little cover letter (which was appreciated by the recruiter apparently!).

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