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.

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

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:

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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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!).

So, as I said, I sent my Resume beginning of this week, and, apparently, it had a relatively good impact with the recruiters at Nuance because Jean-Philipe was contacted twice regarding my candidature on that same day. I was pleased to hear that from Jean-Philipe. However, the real surprise/good news came in yesterday when I got an e-mail from the Manager of Internation Speech Science at Nuance saying that he was interested in talking to me about a position as a Speech Scientist at Nuance in Montreal. Ever since that e-mail, I have been reading and collecting more information about the position and the company. I have many questions for him and am expecting the phone call today or Tuesday. I am very excited about it. What a great opportunity to blend my mathematical and programming skills, while satisfying my mathematic, logic, and technology never ending curisosity. I’ll keep you posted on this, as always.

If you have any questions regarding this, please post them here on the blog as a comment. I won’t answer personal e-mails on this subject seeing as people can benefit from your questions and it allows me to answer more than one question at a time. Cheers.

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.

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.

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.

Last weekend, Bonnie’s parents were in town. It sort of coincided with two days that were sort of tough for me. I was a little down from the job search, and didn’t feel like talking much. It wasn’t great! Mainly after the meeting with Ken on Tuesday, and the day on Wednesday during which I worked a great deal on my presentation, I am now feeling much better. Actually, I am in a particularly great mood! I am now looking forward to give my presentation at Chemical Computing Group and have been working a lot on it the last two days. In fact, it looks pretty nice and should publish it online as soon as I gave it at their offices, which should be this week.

You are now asking yourself, what does that have to do with the subject header ? Doesn’t it suggest a totally different kind of news ? It didn’t mention anything about how great I feel (sort of). Well, actually, I have to rewind a little and explain why, in the first place, Bonnie’s parents were in town.

You see, we have been looking at Reception Halls for the past month or so and couldn’t decide between two. Both places had “our date” reserved until the beggining of this week, and so we had to make our decision by Monday or Tuesday! We mentionned our hesitations to John and Steph, and they decided to come down from Toronto to help pick up a place. Nice! In fact, it was very nice, because they had lots to share with us and made the process of deciding much more enjoyable.

So here we are. Monday afternoon and we have decided which place it was going to be. The whole week I have been wanting to post pictures on the web, and share some details on the process of choosing the Reception Hall. The main problem: Money. Isn’t it always about money ? We finally decided that the proximity of this place and the size of the room made a big enough difference and was much more worth it for us. The main reason why I am so glad that we have chosen the place is the person with whom we are going to work. He is really nice and ready to make some changes in their menus for us. We are going to have a fabulous wedding reception! No. Correction. A fabulous wedding. Period.

Click here to see the rest of the pictures of the reception hall through flickr.com