Weekly Reflection 24#3: A Rejection

This article is a record and reflection on the life of the week from 2024-01-14 to 2024-01-20.

❄️ First Snow#

The winter in the Netherlands this year is not very cold. The few small snowfalls that I have experienced before did not accumulate into snow. I thought I wouldn't see snow in 24 years, but one morning when I opened the curtains, I was pleasantly surprised to find that everything outside was covered in white. The cold winter wind blew the snowflakes all over the place, creating a blurry white world. Inside the warm house, I turned on some lo-fi music.

I thought about how I haven't seen heavy snowfall since I left the northern part of China. I still remember when I was a child, I used to slide on the occasionally icy slope in front of my house with my friends. Sometimes, we would even pour water on it to make it freeze faster, but this would make it difficult for adults to walk. In high school, I remember during a self-study class, when everyone was focused on solving problems, there was suddenly a faint sound of impact coming from outside the window. When I looked up from the boring text, I saw the cold wind carrying large snowflakes hitting the window. Looking into the distance, the world had turned almost completely white. At that moment, a unanimous exclamation came from the otherwise silent classroom.

The Relaxation After Rejection#

For a long time, I seemed to not know how to reject others. Here, rejection refers to the situation where my thoughts and others' expectations are not aligned, and I tend to compromise myself and satisfy others' expectations. When the "people-pleasing personality" became a rampant label, I rarely attributed my mentality to this reason because in most cases, I just felt that I could efficiently help others solve problems without much time cost, so I tended to answer 'Yes' in most cases.

However, as I continued my studies, I gradually realized the scarcity of time. In this context, I rethought whether I should continue to participate in the campus consulting organization I joined earlier this semester. Initially, I joined this organization with the goal of using my existing knowledge and practicing English. Throughout the process, I did achieve my previous goals, but the long and frequent evening meetings made it difficult for me to adapt. Moreover, overall, I did not encounter many challenges during the entire process, so besides improving my English speaking skills, there was not much growth for me.

So this week, I tried to make some changes.

Midweek, when I was at the gym, I received a text message from the leader of the consulting organization, asking if I still wanted to stay here next semester. I hesitated for a long time on the treadmill, and the thought of expressing my desire to continue staying here earlier made it even harder for me to refuse. However, in the subsequent rounds of internship applications, I realized that there are still many areas I need to learn, and time and energy will be important resources in the future. Moreover, I also need more time to relax in my life. Therefore, rejection became the more suitable choice for the current situation. So, after returning home in the evening, following the format of an email, I wrote a formal rejection letter, expressing my reasons and seeking understanding from others.

After the other party expressed their understanding the next day and everything settled, I also emerged from the dilemma of thinking about my future plans for the past period of time and felt a strange sense of relaxation.

English Bottleneck Period#

When I was learning to play the guitar, I encountered a bottleneck period. When I first started learning the guitar, I always struggled with the clumsiness of changing chords. Later, a friend told me that I just needed to practice, there was no other way. So, I followed his advice and practiced over and over again until one day, I suddenly could smoothly transition from the C chord to the Am chord, and then I could easily switch between the E chord and the G chord. This experience of suddenly mastering a skill filled me with joy. At the same time, this experience made me realize that when encountering a bottleneck period in learning a certain skill, no matter how hard you try, you may not see obvious progress. But during this time, it is still necessary to continue to persevere because accumulation bit by bit is what ultimately leads to change.

The experience of learning English speaking is also similar. Since arriving in the Netherlands, I have tried to seize every opportunity to use English, but progress has been slow. I still tend to speak too fast due to nervousness, which affects normal expression. However, I have been practicing using English in various situations, making mistakes, and improving, gradually breaking free from the obsession with being "grammatically perfect" in spoken English. In this process, my attitude towards English has gradually shifted from "learning English" to "using English," breaking free from the so-called "standard" English and entering into everyday life scenarios, using English based on the purpose of better expressing myself.

This Thursday, I went to Amsterdam for an internship interview at a company. Although the result was not as expected, I suddenly found that my English speaking seemed to have become much more fluent during the entire process. I could basically express myself fully using the existing vocabulary. The bottleneck period in English speaking seemed to have quietly passed.

Thinking of what was mentioned in the article Everything sucks:

Your first 100 blog posts will suck.
Your first 5 books will suck.
Your first 30 talks in public will suck.
Your first 50 paintings will suck.
Your first 100 songs will suck.
Your first 40 YouTube videos will suck.
Yes, I made all of those numbers up.
And it doesn’t matter.
What matters is to understand that you’ll suck at everything in the beginning.

Internship#

Interview#

Last week, I went to Amsterdam for an interview at a cryptocurrency hedge fund. Although the interview went well, I received a rejection letter this week. Upon reflection of the entire process, I found two areas for improvement:

Job searching is essentially a sales process, and the focus of sales is matching needs. While my skills met the requirements, I should have emphasized my financial skills based on the needs of the other party. In this interview, although the other party appreciated my resume, I focused too much on technical skills and neglected the discussion of financial skills, which may have been the fundamental skills the other party truly needed. In FinTech, it is necessary to choose one aspect as the focus and consider the other as a plus.
In terms of interview skills, it is also important to proactively showcase relevant experiences and abilities. In this interview, the interviewer was not a dedicated HR person, and their conversation may not have been focused on fully exploring my abilities and potential. In such cases, I should provide more practical examples during the conversation to demonstrate my relevant skills.

Online Assessment#

Last week, I also completed an online assessment for an investment company, which was the most challenging one so far.

In the coding questions, I encountered problems related to recursion and approximation algorithms. I have limited knowledge of recursion, and I have never studied approximation algorithms before, so I need to learn more about them.
I used to think that I didn't need to practice algorithm questions anymore since I am focusing on data science. However, it seems that it is still necessary because it helps to think about code efficiency and prevents my coding skills from getting rusty.
The numerical reasoning test, which I thought I was good at, also posed a great challenge. I couldn't complete the questions in the given time. I believe the main reason is that I have limited knowledge of solving methods, and my thinking is limited to a few possibilities, wasting a lot of time in futile attempts. I should summarize the main approaches to similar questions and improve in this area.
In the probability theory section, I encountered some difficulties in calculating expected values, both in terms of understanding the questions quickly and finding the appropriate calculation methods. I need to learn more about distributions other than the normal distribution and understand and apply them based on practical examples.

Reading#

This week, I finished reading the book Sweet Death for the Great Detective. I appreciate how the author, Guixue Fangzheng, combines virtual reality with traditional detective stories. The book includes classic locked-room mysteries and "challenge the reader" chapters. Since it is a locked-room mystery, it is important to ensure fairness to the reader by cleverly embedding clues that can withstand post-verification in the text. On the other hand, it is necessary to make full use of the setting to create seemingly "impossible" locked-room murders. In this aspect, it demonstrates Guixue Fangzheng's ability to control the world she created. Each case in the book makes full use of the special settings of the world and presents various methods of committing crimes. Therefore, reading this book is a unique experience. When you try to solve the current puzzle using the methods from the previous case, the author challenges the boundaries of your imagination with bolder solutions.

For me, there are two shortcomings in the book:

Character development. The book has many characters, but their characterization is not deep enough. Most characters have similar "edgy" traits, and their personalities do not leave a strong impression on the reader, which can be burdensome for understanding the plot.
Motive description. Although the focus of locked-room mysteries is often on clever methods of committing crimes, the motives in this book are somewhat simple and even childish. It is difficult to believe that such elaborate and large-scale crimes can be supported by such simple motives.

Weekly Gems#

Data Science#

An introduction to recursion algorithms: Recursion in Python: An Introduction
Dive into Deep Learning: Provides a learning path for deep learning based on the concept of "Learning by Doing."
Data-and-ML-Projects-: Provides data analytics, data science, and machine learning projects that can be included in a portfolio after learning.
How to Schedule & Automatically Run Python Code!: This tutorial explains how to schedule and automatically run Python scripts, which can be helpful for deploying web crawlers or doing quantitative trading.

Career#

HackerRank: A website similar to LeetCode that provides coding challenges, certifications, and job positions. Some companies choose to create online assessments on this platform.
Financial Study Association Amsterdam: Provides internship opportunities in the financial field in the Netherlands.

Pixel Art#

Large clusters of clouds in pixel art always have a special charm. I previously tried to create them in Aseprite but couldn't quite grasp it. After seeing this tweet, I feel like my eyes have been opened. I will give it a try 👀

Books#

The Great Fire of Luoyang: This book can fill my lack of knowledge about the later Han Dynasty and also provide insights into the history of Luoyang.
Clay Doll: This science fiction novel written by a space physics Ph.D. has a fascinating premise of replicating real people as clay dolls. I am curious to see how the author develops such a story.