A nice day out

Well, just got back home from my Fujitsu assessment centre, and it really was quite an enjoyable time. I spent last night at Will's pad in Reading, so that I didn't have to travel down early, which was ace. Some lovely cooking from Ali, writing my presentation for Fujitsu whilst watching Desperate Housewives (which I'm now going to download, shame on me), and getting my ass handed to me in Doom on Will's XBox in the morning would be the highlights of that visit.

So, after a bit more travelling I got to the Fujitsu building in Bracknell, not exactly glamorous, but still fairly modern and high-tech. Met my fellow candidates in the reception, and they all seemed really nice - pity we're in competition eh? :)

Turns out there were two other people (out of the total nine) there from Aston University, one of whom was doing a Business-ish degree, so I can be excused for not knowing her, but one was actually on my course, and I've never seen him before. Wierd.

The first exercise was a group one, we had 25 minutes to design and build a bridge that would support pads of post it notes, out of paper, blu-tac, and a couple of other bits and bobs. We failed pretty spectacularly there, our final effort was only capable of holding up one pad of paper, but I think we all showed some good teamwork skills - which is what they were really looking for.

Second part was the presentation, on "What are you passionate about? And what skills, abilities and attributes make you suitable for a job at Fujitsu?". I did mine on Jazz, and then kept relating jazz back to my various coding qualities - ie; in both jazz and programming, you need a high degree of creativity, within defined rules etc, you get the idea. For a full copy of my 'slides' (it was a paper based presentation, so I just held them up one at a time) and notes (which I didn't use), see attached. Thought the presentation went really well, I was very natural, had a couple of jokes and had a very good basis to present from too.

All in all, very good. We were in the last 40/50, and there's 10-20 places going, so I should hopefully be through to the next round :) Karaoke tonight!

Xx