Tour de Bloc 8: Vertical

Simon getting ready

I’m about a week late because I was traveling for the comp and visiting family, but the pictures are finally ready! The competition at Vertical was really nice. They had just finished renovating their bouldering wall, and so there was more than enough space, and with the new angles and the top-outs, it made for some really fun final problems. In my opinion, the main issue with the event was the mix of junior and open finals, which meant that the open finals started at around 9h00! The competitors had a really long break before finals, and the spectators were a little tired by the end of it all. Having said that, it was definitively worth staying to watch the finalists crushing.

Here are a couple of my favourite pictures from the comp. Visit the Tour de Bloc site or my flickr photostream for more pictures.

Stacey flying in problem #5Eva walking problem #4

Bon, je suis en retard d’à peu près une semaine, à cause du voyage pour la compétition et d’une petite visite familiale, mais les photos sont enfin prêtes! La compétition à Vertical était vraiment bien. Grâce à une rénovation de leur mur de bloc, l’espace et les angles pour les problèmes finales étaient vraiment incroyable! D’après moi, le problème principale était le mixte des finales pour les juniors et les “open”. À cause des deux finales, les compétiteurs “open” ont seulement commencées vers 21h00, et donc ils avaient eux une très longue pause et les spectateurs étaient un peu fatigués vers la fin. Malgré tout, les finales en valaient la peine!

Voici quelques-unes de mes photos préférer de la compétition. Allez visiter le site du Tour de Bloc ou mon photostream flickr pour plus de photos.

Men

  1. Florent Balsez
  2. Sebastien Lazure
  3. Ayo Sopeju
  4. Miles Adamson
  5. Simon Villeneuve
  6. Travis Van Ryn
  7. Remi Chrusten
  8. Izzy Friedman

Women

  1. Stacey Weldon
  2. Katerine Martin
  3. Eva Pepin-Helie
  4. Amanda Berezowski
  5. Kim Weaver
  6. Cloé Legault
  7. Alyssa Herzig
  8. Sophie Dufresne

Ayo on problem #2

Flo on problem #3Flo swinging on problem #3

Ayo on problem #3Ayo flashing problem #3

Sebas on problem #3

Simon working problem #4

Simon cruising problem #5

Julius Shulman in Montreal – March 28th 2009

Oh how I wish i could be there this weekend to get a peak at the new movie on Julius Shulman’s life. A quote from his wikipedia entry:

Julius Shulman (born October 10, 1910) is an American architectural photographer best known for his photograph “Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960″ (seen bellow).

Visit the official website to find out when and where they will be. All I know is that they are part of the 27th International Festival of Films on Art held in Montreal from March 19 to 29, 2009. They will be showing the movie at the Canadian Centre for Architecture at 4pm. Get a sneak peek from youtube here. In the meantime, get inspired by looking at the shots that made Julius Shulman so famous:

Case Study House #22

Case Study House #22 (2)

My Second Interview with Accenture

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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Phone Interview with Nuance

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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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

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