by Willy Franzen on June 23, 2008
For some new grads it takes them a realization before they can get anything done in their job search. For some companies it takes Realization to help them get projects done and accomplish the goals that they set out to achieve. Realization provides their clients with execution management systems that help managers do 2 simple things:
1. Keep all work across all departments and across all levels of management tightly coordinated.
2. Exercise proactive control – stamp out small problems before they become big problems that require firefighting.
These may sound like things that companies should be able to take care of themselves, but clearly they can’t. Otherwise, Realization wouldn’t exist.
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by Willy Franzen on June 21, 2008
Half of the news lately has been about high gas prices. It gets tiring, since the stories never bring a new angle. Oddly enough, gas has been relatively price inelastic until recently. Prices would go up, and people would keep on driving like they did with lower gas prices. We’ve finally hit a point where people are actually cutting back on their driving because gas is so expensive. Although we haven’t done any research to back this up, we’d bet that home energy use is even less price elastic that gasoline use. Most people’s Dad’s yell at them for leaving a light on, but they don’t take serious measures to limit their home energy consumption – it takes too much effort. The Association for Energy Affordability is a New York City based non-profit that promotes energy affordability through conservation in the home.
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by Willy Franzen on May 26, 2008
Happy Memorial Day! First and foremost, this is a day to remember those who have given their lives to protect our freedom. Help us send a big thank you out to all of those who have ever served in the armed forces, while we remember those who are no longer with us. We considered writing about careers in the military today, but it seemed a bit out of our realm. If that’s something that interests you, then you should take a look at Today’s Military to get a better sense of the options that are out there. Instead, we’re going to stick with a Memorial Day tradition that we’re much better acquainted with – the barbecue. As the official beginning of summer, Memorial Day is the perfect time to fire up your Weber-Stephen grill.
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by Willy Franzen on May 22, 2008
It’s safe to say that the environment is becoming a big political issue again. If the trend continues, a likely result will be increased government regulation. It’s important that our shared resources are protected, but government regulation often ends up creating intricacies and loopholes that increase the cost of doing business without accomplishing the desired beneficial outcome. It’s easy to say that companies should just suck it up and learn to stop putting the environment at risk, but that point of view fails to look at the whole picture. There are very few people in the world whose livelihoods don’t have an adverse impact on the environment, which means that more restriction can significantly decrease some people’s abilities to put food on the table (it can also significantly decrease a corporation’s ability to put billion dollar profits on the table). Businesses often have to jump through hoops to gain both government and community approval of environmentally sensitive projects, but they rarely retain staff with such specialties. Aspen Environmental Group is a company that provides the required expertise.
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by Willy Franzen on May 21, 2008
Have you ever seen those little LED flashlights? The ones that have a single tiny bulb but are many times brighter than regular old flashlights. They’re quite the modern miracle, but they’re nothing compared to the flashlights Intelligent Optical Systems is producing. To call them flashlights is actually an understatement, they’re really called LED Incapacitation Systems. They are the next generation in non-lethal weaponry, and they’re getting a lot of attention now that there’s a backlash against tasers.
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by Willy Franzen on May 7, 2008
It’s hard for me to write this post, because I have a strong allegiance to Marvin, which is one of Pella’s biggest competitors. It started in 7th grade when I was working at my Dad’s architecture firm. The entire office was invited to a lobster lunch put on by some Marvin sales reps. My partner in crime (a friend of mine who was old enough to have the coveted title of intern) and I jumped at the chance to take a break from shooting rubber bands at each other and join the architects for a free lunch. We had to endure a long sales pitch about windows, like that South Park episode where the parents endure a time share sales pitch in return for a free skiing weekend, but when it was finally over, we chowed down. My then overweight 7th grade self put away a couple of lobsters and almost put one in my pocket for the ride home. It was by far the best day during my Summer job, but I’m willing to forget a couple lobsters and start pushing Pella, because they’ve truly impressed me with their college recruiting and entry-level hiring program.
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by Willy Franzen on May 1, 2008
My house in college was not energy efficient, unless you consider the heating system’s not working half the time a feature of design. The doors and windows all leaked cold air in the winter, and it was impossible to cool the house down below about 95 degrees in the summer. We even tried covering the windows in the winter for added insulation, but it didn’t help much. Our monthly heating bills were outrageous despite the fact that my roommates were cheap and insisted on turning the thermostat down below the point at which our landlord warned us that the pipes would freeze. Energy efficiency was clearly not a priority for whoever built our house, but if it had been they could have hired someone like Rumsey Engineers to design it.
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by Willy Franzen on April 28, 2008
So what? I’ve become a mild Twitter addict. I keep finding internships by scanning tweets and following the links in them, but, unfortunately, I can’t say the same about entry-level jobs. The term entry-level is reserved mostly for job postings, while the word internship is near universal – so it’s used conversationally (like on Twitter). Yesterday, I found a link to a post by a Sun Microsystems employee who is looking for two interns. Her post led us to Sun’s main Careers site, which truly impressed us – especially because of the way that they present their entry-level job offerings.
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by Willy Franzen on April 9, 2008
If you don’t know what Google is, you have no business conducting your job search online. You should be typing your resume on a typewriter and sending it by carrier pigeon. We’ve been saying it over and over, but Google is the ultimate job search tool. They’re also the ultimate employer according to Fortune Magazine. With that said, many of you know that getting a job at Google is nearly impossible, especially now that most of their campus recruiting efforts are finished.
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by Willy Franzen on March 7, 2008
You probably don’t realize it, but the process that goes into printing things like cereal boxes and magazines can be extremely harmful to the environment. Your first thought might be that it’s because of all the forests that are cut down to make paper, but trees are actually a renewable resource when managed properly. It’s the chemicals involved in the printing process that can take a serious toll on both the environment and the health of the workers who use them. We’re not going to see an end to beautifully designed boxes of Lucky Charms and 324 page magazines that are 277 pages of ads, but there are ways to make the printing process greener (and we don’t mean by mixing blue and yellow ink). Amerikal is a company that is finding ways to allow us to continue with the luxuries of beautiful packaging, without the guilt (that you should be feeling now that we’ve alerted you to it).
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by Willy Franzen on March 3, 2008
There’s a significant chance that you, as a college student, don’t have a landline telephone number, and instead rely entirely on a cell phone. Besides being a recipe for irritating recruiters (they hate doing interviews with people on cell phones, but they don’t really have a choice, now do they?), this also means that you likely have no appreciation for the complexities of phone systems. Neither do we. Businesses spend boatloads of money on complex phone systems that include extensions, voicemail, paging, and other features. For large companies, such systems are a necessity, but for smaller businesses they are often a front to make the company appear more professional to its customers. GotVMail Grasshopper is a startup that has created web-based phone management software that is affordable, easy to manage, and extremely flexible. Whether you’re a consultant named Gary (GotVMail’s mascot) or a college student starting a business in your dorm room, GotVMail offers tools that allow you to manage your telephone needs easily while looking like a real business.
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by Willy Franzen on February 27, 2008
Surgery takes practice. You can’t jump elbows deep into someone’s chest cavity and reroute traffic without having perfected the motor skills, knowledge, and composure required to do so. The problem is that practicing surgery is tricky. You need to do it on a living, breathing thing for it to be realistic. There aren’t too many people who are jumping at the opportunity to be cut up by aspiring surgeons, so that leaves only one viable option. Sadly, animals are used as proxies for human patients. Anyone would agree that this is an undesirable outcome, but there has been no other way to teach life saving procedures and develop new surgical techniques. The good news is that Sarasota, FL based Animal Replacement Technologies has created a brilliant solution.
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by Willy Franzen on February 21, 2008
We mentioned a couple weeks back that Facebook now has a valuation on par with that of the Ford Motor Company. In our post about Facebook, we focused on how impressive the growth has been of “Web 2.0″ companies, but didn’t mention the equally impressive decline of American auto manufacturers. It’s sad to say, but the reason for the decline has a lot to do with foreign auto companies making better products, and doing it with American talent! Honda is one of those companies that has been kicking the Big Three’s butts by putting out great cars, and a big part of it has been because of their research and development.
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by Willy Franzen on February 5, 2008
BAE Systems is a global defence (they’re British) and aerospace company. They are quite huge, employing close to 100,000 people across the world, which means that they do an enormous amount of entry-level hiring. BAE Systems operates in a wide range of businesses – from land armaments to regional aircraft, from military air solutions to communications and electronic warfare systems. Their timeline of milestones will give you a better idea of the specifics of what they do. BAE Systems is probably not the best fit if you participated in a peace protest during college, but if you want to be in the industry that is pushing the bounds of engineering, it’s hard to overlook defense.
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by Willy Franzen on January 25, 2008
Solar power is one of those things that continues to amaze you long after you’re first introduced to it. Even if it’s just a photovoltaic cell connected to a lightbulb, the harnessing of the sun’s power always seems to generate a feeling of child-like amazement. Lucky for our planet, that youthful exuberance has remained in many of today’s entrepreneurs, even after they have grown up. Because of them, it seems that we might soon see the day when solar power moves from something that hobbyists play around with to a real source of sustainable energy.
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by Willy Franzen on January 24, 2008
College is when you make decisions that affect the rest of your life. You pick a major, you choose to study (or party) hard, and you might even decide to ask out your future spouse. Then, one night, things get a little out of hand. You wake up on the living room floor of your apartment, you walk to the bathroom, look into the mirror, and see that you’ve managed to get a bit of ink on yourself. No, your friends didn’t shame you with sharpies. You got a tattoo. It’s not going to wash off, no matter how hard you scrub. Sorry, mom.
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by Willy Franzen on January 18, 2008
Today’s post is probably a shot in the dark, but we love the company’s products, and it’s still MacWorld Expo week, so we’re going to write about them anyways. What Elgato Systems does is simple – they make products that allow you to watch television on your Mac. Their hardware devices are plug and play and their software is absolutely killer. It’s also a DVR, so you can record your shows, export them to your iPod and watch them wherever you want. You can even record Jeopardy!, export it, send it to a friend, and play over the phone – not that we’ve ever done that.
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by Willy Franzen on January 16, 2008
Yesterday, we spent a good part of the day camped in front of our computers reading MacRumors.com’s live blog updates from the Apple Keynote at MacWorld Expo San Francisco. In case you aren’t a “macfanboy,” you should know that they announced the MacBook Air, updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch software, improved AppleTV functionality with downloadable movie rentals, and a wireless router/storage/backup device called Time Capsule. For some who were expecting more, yesterday’s products announcements were quite a disappointment, while for others, it was like Christmas morning all over again. Anyways, today’s event was a great display of how even huge companies can remain innovative, and that got us thinking about how a new college grad can snag a job at Apple.
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by Willy Franzen on January 9, 2008
Let’s say instead of giving away a Wii over the holiday season, we chose to scalp it on Craigslist. Three interested parties e-mail us with offers to meet up for the exchange. We don’t want to get scammed, and we also want to avoid wasting our time going to meet someone who doesn’t show. How would we find out if the people who e-mailed us are trustworthy? We could try Googling their e-mail address and see what comes up, or we could use RapLeaf to check their reputations.
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by Willy Franzen on January 4, 2008
So, we’re still on vacation here at One Day, One Job. We didn’t tell you, but for the past week our daily posts have been coming from a tropical island with poor wireless Internet coverage. We thought there’d be at least one rainy day where we could finish off our posts and act like no vacation ever happened, but, unfortunately for you, the weather has been beautiful. On that note, today’s post is going to be a quick run down of what Tesla Motors does and why they look like a cool company for college seniors to research for career opportunities.
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by Willy Franzen on December 29, 2007
It’s the last weekend of the year, so that means that today is our second to last non-profit job of the year. What that means, we’re not really sure. We do know that KickStart is doing some pretty cool things that you should know about. They are a non-profit organization that is aiming to help millions of people out of poverty. There are a lot of organizations that are fighting poverty, but KickStart is doing it with some pretty cool tactics.
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by Willy Franzen on December 7, 2007
Not too long ago, the only unmanned aerial vehicles were planes flown by women. Now we live in a world where planes can fly themselves. We thought we were pretty high-tech when we set up a blog, coded our own template, and figured out how to optimize our site for Google; however, the companies that design, develop, and produce autonomous aircraft put us to absolute shame.
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by Willy Franzen on November 19, 2007
As Derek Zoolander once said, “Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.” That should mean that WET Design employees work with beauty every day. Wet Design, located in Sun Valley, CA, specializes in the development and design of water features for architecture, landscape, and urban design. Water is a pretty versatile medium. Nature has done a hell of a job with it. Niagara Falls, Old Faithful, and the Pacific Ocean are all awe inspiring. WET Design hasn’t done too bad itself with the Bellagio, the Wynn Macau, and apparently the fountain scene from Blank Check.
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by Willy Franzen on November 14, 2007
You woke up this morning, ran out the door, and grabbed a coffee on your way to an 8:00 AM lecture. No time for breakfast. This isn’t right. College seniors aren’t supposed to have early classes, but somehow you got stuck with an unfulfilled requirement and a mandatory attendance policy. After class you have to meet with your advisor to talk about your thesis and how you don’t have one. Then it’s lunch with your friend who just endured a serious break up. Finally, you can settle down for 6 hours in the library studying for your mid-term tomorrow. After about 2 hours of productivity, and 4 hours of procrastination, you run off to your intramural water polo match. Your team wins, but you swallow about a half gallon of water. So you shiver your way back (wet hair sucks in the winter) to the library and eventually settle down and get some studying done. It’s been a long day. You get back to your apartment, drop your bag on the floor, throw your cell phone on your side table, and hop into bed. Crap. You have a phone interview tomorrow for a job you don’t really want, but your cell phone’s battery will probably die even before the alarm wakes you up in the morning. You have to get out of your warm bed (why are your roommates too cheap to turn up the heat?), reach behind your side table, and plug in your phone. After everything you did today, for some reason this task seems impossible.
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