Into "The City"

For those of you who don't hang out with New Yorkers or folks from the area on a regular basis, "The City" supposedly refers to New York City. More often than not, it refers specifically to Manhattan. I can't remember where I was, but I happened to glance over at a poster that showed the cover of New Yorker magazine's map of the world. I feel like this generally captures how New Yorkers see the world. There is New York and then there's everything else. After a visit to London, my brother-in-law recently said, "I think I could live there."

Getting from Staten Island to Manhattan isn't exactly the quickest easiest trip, so I try to keep visits there to a minimum and assume such trips will be many hours. I've been feeling a little directionless in light of recent events, though, and knew I needed something to help me feel like I'm going in a specific direction. So when I remembered the Cornell Club Career Change seminar being held in Manhattan, I geared up for a trip into the City. I've got two main options - 1) an express bus that goes from a stop one mile from our house to downtown and then on to midtown (within a block of the seminar) or 2) a local bus to the ferry to downtown, then subway to midtown. The express bus is about twice as expensive and runs the risk of traffic ensnarement, but there's just so many transfers with the ferry route and I didn't feel like messing with them - not in the rain.

So, off I went. The express bus picks up pretty close to our house, then runs along the highway picking up more Staten Islanders before getting onto the highway and going across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. The Verrazano was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1962. As someone who visits New York City and stays in Staten Island, this is how I picture Brooklyn - speeding past on the highway. It feels short and crowded compared to Manhattan (which is tall and crowded) or Staten Island (which is short and not as crowded). Everything is covered in advertising, likely because I'm seeing it from the highway. I have been on the ground in Brooklyn and it has some really fun neighborhoods. I have enjoyed the Museum of the Moving Picture, the Indian/Bengali section (ready to haggle for expensive stuff all in cash? want to pay for a necklace by weight rather than by design?) and briefly entertained the thought of having to cross the bridge while in labor.

Then we went through the Battery Tunnel, which pops out at Battery Park right at the southern tip of Manhattan. This is the earliest part of New York City (aka New Amsterdam) to be settled, so the streets here are a little more tangly than midtown. We passed the World Trade Center site, which now has construction that is visibly above street level. The express bus is Greyhound style, so you're up pretty high and can see right into the fenced-in construction pit, which I've always found kinda cool. This is what Manhattan looks like to me - lots of pedestrians, tall buildings, all of which seem to have store fronts at least on the ground floor and sometimes for the first few floors. Even when it's miserably raining, look how many people are out and about! Note in this picture: no snow. Back in Staten Island, we were still working on melting away the 15 in we got. In Manhattan (and perhaps Brooklyn a bit too, from the look of the pictures), they shovel the snow into trucks and drive it away. They can't afford to lose the precious street and sidewalk space to heaps of snow. Where it ends up exactly is some fish's problem. I hate to think, personally. They're at least amazingly organized about dealing with snow here - awesome since we've had 15 in falls two or three weeks running now.

I got to my lovely career workshop in midtown and was relieved to see I wasn't the least dressed up in the room, though I was close. I was as old as or older than all the presenters and other folks in the room, however, because it was a "Cornell Young Alumni" event and I no longer qualify. Thankfully, no one was so unkind as to point that one out to me. They provided some of the usual advice about cover letters and resumes - hey, it's good to see that some things don't change. Then they talked a bit about LinkedIn and the online resources Cornell allows alumni to access through their web portal. Here I felt old and out of touch. How does one keep up with all the great portals and software available for job searching?! Even if I'm not ready to jump into work just yet, I do plan to explore the resources so the process is hopefully a little less painful than last time. It's really just so depressing to send out more than 100 applications, get maybe five interviews and then one offer that is ok at best. To then read materials that recommend that you try to negotiate a better salary...gosh, I felt lucky to get an offer, why risk it by asking for more than they may be able to afford (yes, I did get that answer when I tried to negotiate).

I enjoyed the seminar, got some feedback on my resume (yes, it really DOES have to be only one page, regardless how much experience I may have), had an entertaining time "networking" with all the younger alumni who were obviously hunting for jobs themselves, and enjoyed some funny snacks. I ran into one of Dan's fraternity brothers, class of '02 who remembered him fondly. He mentioned that half his class is unemployed. Now where he got this statistic is mind-boggling to me because usually a university goes to some trouble to research and disseminate POSITIVE statistics about their graduates. He said he found it encouraging, though, because it meant it wasn't just him having trouble finding work. It still sounds daunting to me, though.

Going home was a piece of cake - just hop back on my comfy bus and ride it all the way home. Call Dan when I enter Staten Island and he waits in the nice dry car to pick me up at the bus stop and finish the ride home. It took me a day or two to organize my thoughts and get a profile started on LinkedIn. I'm still revising my resume to make it fit on a page. Eek! I may have to get rid of my moth-naming experience. That would be so sad. I think it's a fun conversation starter that I used to work in entomological pornography. Please do check out my profile when you have time.

I'll find a way to get the resume ready to roll. I like having a spot to put more details in case people want them, though. I'm still trying to figure out how to capture 2009 for the purposes of a resume, though. I'm pretty proud of my Flickr photostream, but I don't know how to just list a URL that will refer strangers to it. So far, I only know that when I search for "Grenada, tree, flower" I come up in the first page of results for now. If you do a bad search, you then have the option to search by person and I've found my "SandyOverseas" there. I appreciate any feedback/critiques on this work in progress. I also welcome links. I've been having fun connecting with long lost coworkers and colleagues. It's a little addictive, as I am told Facebook is, but I am willing to put in the time because it is less recreational than Facebook.