More jobby thoughts

Application deadlines

If you are hiring someone, and you put an ad with a deadline of July 12 (for instance), do you look at resumes and/or start interviewing people before then?

Loyalty and Ethics

If you say yes to Company A's job offer, and then Company B calls you up and wants to interview you, do you go for it if Company B is cooler than A? At what point do you say, "No, I've got a job" -- never?

Salary Expectations

When a job ad asks you for salary expectations or history, is it a problem to ignore it? That's what I've been doing. I figure if they like me, they'll contact me anyway.

If you DO choose to give out salary expectations, do you primarily base it on how much you need to make to maintain the style of living you want, or do you primarily base it on what you've made in the past, or do you primarily base it on what similar jobs are likely to pay (ie. the market)?

I just did some calculations. Based on the nicer 1-2 bedroom apartments on the market (right at TTC in a nice neighbourhood, with a pool or gym in the building), top cable, internet, cellphone and landline packages, adding in a ttc pass AND car insurance and gas, and assuming a food and other shopping budget of about $50 per day, while saving $500 per month, expenses in TO would come to about 50K, plus any traveling or large purchases I wanted. Of course I would not choose to live like that even if I could afford it. I'd rather have cash to purchase items and go con-hopping and travel and save up lots of money for the future than max all of that stuff out. If I lived more modestly than that but with a little more wiggle room and luxury than I do now, I'd need about 40K. If I want to be just barely squeezing by, then around what I'm paid now (31K).

Drowning in Statistics

I have a confession to make. I nearly flunked Intro to Satistics at MIT (I passed statistical physics, though), and so I dropped the course. I don't know if this was a function of my state of mind, or my own personal blind spot, but ultimately what it means is that I don't know my statistics well at all.

The statistics I did learn to do in lab were all using Matlab, a tool to which I no longer have access.

I'm supposed to be analyzing this data for an article on the educational market. I've got the number of students (male, female, and both) in JK-13 beginning with the year 1997/98 and ending with the year 2003/2004 for all of Canada, and broken down by province and territory.

I need to extrapolate numbers for the next school year (2006/07). But the curves are not exponential or linear, so far as I can see. They are more complex than that.

Excel 2003, the program I have access to, has a data analysis pack, but the help section simply refers me to a long list of textbooks. Eek!

I don't know what I'm going to do/how I'm going to do this. Anyone able to offer advice? metalana?

You'd think that I could simply get away with saying, "the kids who were in 1st grade in 2003/04 will be in 4th grade in 2006/07." But looking at these curves, the relationships aren't that simple. Kids are held back, or skip grades, or leave the country or public system, or enter from another country or private school. And in high school, it's a real mess, because of the phasing out of OAC (Gr. 13) in Ontario; in 2003, two generations of students "graduated" in the same year. Many of the students destined to graduate in 2003 likely either aimed to graduate early or late so as to not get burned by the double cohort, leading to some very strange looking graphs/statistics.

Gah. *frustration*