I think this month has been the most stressful month of my entire university life.
Good that I chose to do 2 courses each semester, or else I would truly be dying right now.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET INTO A GRADUATE PROGRAM?!
I suppose it's because of the thousands of people graduating every year; all wanting to work at a big corporate company.. but seriously I didn't expect it to be this hard.. and time consuming!
There's the initial application stage which takes at least an hour; some of them require you to write paragraphs about why you want to work for the company, and what are your extra-curricular achievements and you have to change your cover letter every time, to show them that you've put effort into tailoring it just for them. Then after that, it's the stupid psychometric online tests, which is the worst part for me.
They're not hard or anything, just a verbal, numerical and logical reasoning test, at high-school level. The thing about them is that they only give you 15 minutes to answer 20 questions in each test! That includes reading all the freakin passages in the verbal one and all the charts and tables in the maths one! Which leaves you like less than 30 seconds to answer each question..><
And then if you get through that, you may have to do more online assessments like the simulation one I just did for ANZ which was basically a bunch of videos that you had to watch, about work situations and then choose the best and worst solution. I thought it would be easy, like 'What do you do if you catch someone stealing?' 'A. Steal with them, B. Report to the manager, C. Don't do anything' or something similar, but nope! All the options seemed right and all the options seemed wrong! How are we supposed to know these things when we haven't started working yet?!
Then if you actually make it through all that, this is where the real stuff begin: Interviews.
First it's a phone interview, where they mainly ask you behavioural questions like 'Describe a time when you had conflict with one of your colleagues' or some shit like that, and then if you do well enough in that, they'll invite you to an assessment center, where lo and behold, you spend the whole day doing more assessments.. yay :D
And finally if you've survived all of that, then you may actually get an offer to the program.
And that's just for one application to one company. Imagine doing that ten times T_T
It'd be okay if you actually made it in the end, but what about when you made it all the way to the interviews and then you get rejected.. feels like such a big waste of your time.
It's like a never-ending assignment.. and I've barely just started.
There's the initial application stage which takes at least an hour; some of them require you to write paragraphs about why you want to work for the company, and what are your extra-curricular achievements and you have to change your cover letter every time, to show them that you've put effort into tailoring it just for them. Then after that, it's the stupid psychometric online tests, which is the worst part for me.
They're not hard or anything, just a verbal, numerical and logical reasoning test, at high-school level. The thing about them is that they only give you 15 minutes to answer 20 questions in each test! That includes reading all the freakin passages in the verbal one and all the charts and tables in the maths one! Which leaves you like less than 30 seconds to answer each question..><
And then if you get through that, you may have to do more online assessments like the simulation one I just did for ANZ which was basically a bunch of videos that you had to watch, about work situations and then choose the best and worst solution. I thought it would be easy, like 'What do you do if you catch someone stealing?' 'A. Steal with them, B. Report to the manager, C. Don't do anything' or something similar, but nope! All the options seemed right and all the options seemed wrong! How are we supposed to know these things when we haven't started working yet?!
Then if you actually make it through all that, this is where the real stuff begin: Interviews.
First it's a phone interview, where they mainly ask you behavioural questions like 'Describe a time when you had conflict with one of your colleagues' or some shit like that, and then if you do well enough in that, they'll invite you to an assessment center, where lo and behold, you spend the whole day doing more assessments.. yay :D
And finally if you've survived all of that, then you may actually get an offer to the program.
And that's just for one application to one company. Imagine doing that ten times T_T
It'd be okay if you actually made it in the end, but what about when you made it all the way to the interviews and then you get rejected.. feels like such a big waste of your time.
It's like a never-ending assignment.. and I've barely just started.
Already got rejected by two companies sigh.. I'm so scared to check my e-mails now in case I get another rejection letter. I don't think I deal well with rejection. It makes me super depressed and moody and I end up crying and feeling dumb and useless, and lose motivation to keep going ><
But I have to keep going.. I have to keep telling myself that I can do this, and that it'll all be worth it in the end.
But I have to keep going.. I have to keep telling myself that I can do this, and that it'll all be worth it in the end.
