Career fairs and what they mean !

Career Fairs and what they mean.

I was going through the career fair of UW-Madison and visited as many as about 10 companies. A total of about 400 companies visited UW-Campus this year. How did I choose to visit only some of them ?!

There are usually two types of companies out there.
Class 1 - These companies visit the campuses for their face value.
Class 2 - These companies visit the campuses to recognize if in general there are candidates that are potentially their future employees. Also, they recognize whether it is possible for them to increase the pace at which they can recruit the candidates. These companies might sometimes conduct immediate interviews in their visit. They will usually carry resumes with them and sometimes write notes on them to recognize those later and possibly get back to candidates in future.

An Aside here - Consider the stable marriage problem

In mathematics, the stable marriage problem (SMP) is the problem of finding a stable matching — a matching in which no element of the first matched set prefers an element of the second matched set that also prefers the first element.

It is commonly stated as:

Given n men and n women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex with a unique number between 1 and n in order of preference, marry the men and women off such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners. If there are no such people, all the marriages are "stable".

To the best of my knowledge, the one choosing in the stable marriage problem finds the best deal. In our case the companies choosing the candidates will get the better candidates. However if you are to choose, you would get better deal. Now ! the point is that you can easily recognize the companies which belong to class 1 or class 2. If they start with explaining their application processes online etc, they belong to class 1. If they possibly read your resume, talk with you about your specific research problems, and finally give you their visiting cards and ask you to post them copies of your electronic resume, and then tell about the procedure to apply online, so that you are in their system, they belong to class 2.

If your choice list has companies which are in class 2. Devote more time talking to their HR guys. Present yourself well ! Carry your resume, a couple of powerpoint slides if you want, be brief, complete, precise and hit the point ! - All in all - Your 2 min presentation should have some substance!

If the companies of your choice belong to class 1 - There is nothing much you can do - Go and apply to their online web page applications.
Either ways, hope for the best and prepare for the upcoming interviews.

Crystallization models.

Three models of crystal growth - reproduced from Yu et. al.

The HNB model assumes that GC growth occurs via the coalescence of homogeneous crystal nuclei onto existing crystal surfaces at a rate defined by the β relaxation of the liquid, rather than the alpha relaxation.

The model of tension-induced interfacial mobility postulates that GC growth is the same as crystal growth in the diffusion-controlled mode, except that diffusion is enhanced at the crystal/liquid interface due to the tension created by the density difference between the crystal and the liquid. Because a crystal usually is denser than a liquid or a glass, crystal growth may induce extensional stress around a crystal due to volume contraction. While some argue that this stress should slow crystal growth (e.g., by thermodynamically destabilizing the crystal, Tanaka suggests that this stress “should provide the free volume to the particles surrounding the crystal, increase their mobility, and help further crystallization.” This process would be possible only at temperatures so low that flow cannot relieve the stress on the time scale of crystal growth.


The model of solid-state crystal growth by local mobility assumes that the molecular motions responsible for GC growth are not the alpha process (the motion responsible for diffusion controlled growth), but a local molecular motion native to the glassy (solid) state.