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 was not very cold. The few small snowfalls we had before were not enough to accumulate snow. I thought I wouldn't see snow in 24 years, but one morning when I opened the curtains, I was pleasantly surprised to see everything outside covered in white. The cold winter wind blew the snowflakes all over, creating a blurry white world. I stayed in the warm house and played lo-fi music.

I realized that I hadn't seen heavy snow since I left the northern part of China. I still remember when I was a child, my friends and I would slide on the occasionally icy slope in front of our house. 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 busy solving problems, I suddenly heard a faint sound of snowflakes hitting 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, the otherwise quiet classroom was filled with exclamations of awe.

The Relaxation After Refusing#

For a long time, I seemed to not know how to refuse others. By refusal, I mean that when there is a discrepancy between my own thoughts and others' expectations, I tend to compromise and satisfy others' expectations. When the "people-pleaser" personality became a prevalent 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. Therefore, in most cases, I tend to answer 'Yes.'

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 became difficult for me to adapt to. 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 when I thought about my previous expression of the desire to continue staying here, it 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 life. Therefore, refusal became a 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, when everything settled down, I also emerged from the dilemma of thinking about my plans for the next year and felt a strange sense of relaxation.

The Bottleneck Period of English#

When I was learning to play the guitar, I encountered a bottleneck period. When I first started learning the guitar, I struggled with the clumsiness of changing chords. Later, a friend told me that I just needed to keep practicing, there was no other way. So, I followed his advice and repeated the practice over and over again until one day, I suddenly could smoothly switch 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 skill, no matter how hard you try, you may not see obvious progress. However, during such times, it is still necessary to persevere because it is through gradual accumulation that real change can happen.

The experience of learning English speaking is similar. Since I arrived 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 my ability to express myself properly. However, I have been practicing using English in various situations, making mistakes, and improving. I have gradually let go of the obsession with being "grammatically perfect" in spoken English. In this process, my attitude towards English has also changed from "learning English" to "using English." I have moved away from the so-called "standard" English and started using it in everyday life to better express myself.

This Thursday, I went to Amsterdam for an internship interview at a company. Although the result was not as expected, I suddenly realized that my English speaking had become much more fluent during the entire process. I could express myself effectively using the existing vocabulary. It seemed like the bottleneck period of my English speaking had 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 hunting is essentially a sales process, and the key to sales is matching needs. While my skills met the requirements, I should have emphasized my financial skills based on the needs of the company. In this interview, although the interviewer appreciated my resume, I focused too much on technical skills and neglected the discussion on financial skills, which might be the basic skills the company truly needed. In FinTech, it is necessary to choose one aspect as a focus and consider the other as a plus.
In terms of interview skills, it is important to proactively showcase relevant experiences and abilities. In this interview, the interviewer was not a dedicated HR person, and their focus might not have been on exploring my abilities and potential. In such situations, I should have provided 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 had limited knowledge of recursion, and I had 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 necessary to do so, not only to improve code efficiency but also to keep my coding skills sharp.
The numerical reasoning test, which I thought I was good at, posed a significant challenge. I couldn't complete the questions in time. I realized that the main reason was my limited understanding of problem-solving methods. My thinking was limited to a few possibilities, so I wasted a lot of time in futile attempts. I need to summarize the main approaches to 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 real-life examples.

Reading#

This week, I finished reading Sweet Death for the 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. In order to maintain fairness to the readers, the author cleverly embeds clues that can withstand post-verification in the text. On the other hand, the author fully utilizes the setting of the environment to create seemingly "impossible" locked-room murders. This demonstrates Fangzheng's ability to create a world and manipulate it. 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 of the characters have similar "adolescent" traits, and their personalities do not leave a strong impression on the readers, which can be burdensome for understanding the plot.
Motive description. Although the focus of the book is on intricate methods of committing crimes, the motives behind the crimes 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: This book provides a learning path for deep learning based on the concept of "Learning by Doing."
Data-and-ML-Projects-: This repository 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: This website is similar to LeetCode and provides coding challenges, certifications, and job positions. Some companies choose to create online assessments on this platform.
Financial Study Association Amsterdam: This website 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 get it right. After seeing this tweet, I feel like my eyes have been opened. I will give it a try soon! 👀

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., explores the replication of real people as clay dolls. I am curious to see how the author develops this story.