Category: Learning & Career

Introduction

Job hunting is the first big wall you run into on the way to entering the working world.
Unlike the studying you have done at school up to now, it has no single right answer, and it asks you to find the best possible answer within a relationship between people. For most of us, it is something we have never attempted before.

Because of this, I have heard friends say all sorts of things: that they have no idea what the right answer is, that they don’t know who they really are, that the whole thing is just a game of academic pedigree or pure luck.

And yet, have you never had the strange experience of seeing someone from the same school, in much the same circumstances as you, somehow rack up one job offer after another?

As I said above, job hunting is a matter of people choosing people. If you can convince the person evaluating you and make them want to work with you, you can be chosen even without anything in your academic record or background that stands out from everyone else.

So in this series of blog posts, titled “Job Hunting That Earns You Points,” I want to write about how to go after the job you want proactively.

Let me say up front that I am a doctoral student, so I have never been through a job hunt myself.
That said, when it comes to things like application essays and interview preparation, there is a great deal of overlap with life as a researcher.
I also regularly field questions about job hunting from friends and younger students, which I think puts me in a good position to see objectively the traps that people tend to fall into.

Given that background, this series may differ in many ways from the standard job-hunting guide.
You don’t need to take all of it on board, but I hope some of it helps.

Why “Job Hunting That Earns You Points”?

How do you imagine companies make their choices during the hiring process?

You might picture each company having its own set of criteria and conducting interviews according to those items.

What struck me most in talking with job seekers is that, when people hold that kind of image, many of them unconsciously assume that evaluation works by subtracting points.

In other words: everyone starts at 100 points when they submit their application, then “that interview answer was weak, minus 1 point,” “the school on the résumé isn’t strong, minus 5 points,” and whoever has the highest score at the end gets hired. Something like that.

Now flip it around. Suppose you are organizing an event and you have to appoint one collaborator from five applicants. How would you choose?

In this case, even if you have your own criteria, what you would weigh most heavily is the person: whether they are a good fit for making the event a success, whether they have the ability, whether they can be trusted not to cause problems. It is not that subtraction plays no role, but rather that everyone starts at 0 points when they apply, and then “they clearly have their own ideas, plus 1 point,” “they’re good at planning, plus 5 points,” with the highest scorer getting the job. In other words, you decide by adding points, don’t you?

Because of this gap in how the choosing side and the chosen side implicitly think about selection, applicants very often fail to meet what the company is actually looking for.

Common examples: assembling an application essay like a jigsaw puzzle out of several essays that got other people hired in the past, or saying the safest, most inoffensive things in an interview because they sound like what everyone would say.

If you understand what kind of person the company wants and pitch yourself accordingly, you can get yourself properly evaluated for who you actually are.

Throughout this series, approaching your job hunt as a points-earning exercise is the central motivation.

Who Gets Chosen

Next, let’s think about who gets chosen.
What sort of person does a company pick?

Here are a few examples that come to mind.

・Someone with strong academic credentials
・Someone who led a student club
・Someone with an unusual experience
・Someone who has won awards in sports or research
・Someone with strong communication skills

Something along those lines, perhaps.

In my own view, being chosen comes down to

・Having a defining characteristic that sticks in people’s minds
・Being someone people want to work with

These two factors matter most.

Interviewers have to assess an enormous number of candidates, so if you haven’t left an impression, you simply won’t come to mind when the decision is made.
And even if you do come to mind, you won’t be hired unless they want to work with you.

In job hunting, you are constantly told to do thorough self-analysis and company research.
That advice exists precisely to satisfy these two conditions.

Self-analysis → having a defining characteristic that sticks in people’s minds
Company research → being someone people want to work with

If you don’t know what self-analysis and company research are supposed to involve, keeping the goal in mind will naturally clarify where to look.

Closing

I plan to keep publishing posts on this blog as part of the “Job Hunting That Earns You Points” series.

Eventually, I would like to turn it into a book.
If the opportunity arises, I would be glad to expand the content further and contribute a properly polished version.

People often say that smart students’ notebooks are beautiful and easy to read.
But when you try to imitate that and take neat notes in class, you often end up simply copying the board, spending too much time, and generally not getting very far.

The most important thing about note-taking is finding and mastering a style that works for you.
Here I’d like to write about note-taking techniques, using my own approach as an example.

Rules for taking notes

First of all, no matter how much you study note-taking methods, you won’t be able to put them into practice.
What matters is deciding on your own set of note-taking rules.

There are three important points to consider when setting those rules.

• Keep it as simple and clear as possible
• Are you the type who reviews notes later, or the type who memorizes on the spot?
• How you categorize information

Keep it as simple and clear as possible

In situations where you take notes, such as classes and lectures, information keeps flowing past you.
To take notes under those conditions, you need to get things down on paper quickly.

That’s why, rather than making things pretty with a wide variety of color coding, you need to keep up with the flow of information.
Taking notes isn’t the main task—taking in the information is.

So your rules shouldn’t be something you have to stop and recall. They need to let you choose colors and decide how to write intuitively.

Are you the type who reviews notes later, or the type who memorizes on the spot?

After class, you’ll probably use your notes when studying for exams.
What you write down changes depending on whether you use your notes like a textbook or as cues to jog your memory.

If you use them like a textbook, you need to write down as much of the information from class as possible, which takes time.
On the other hand, you can then study primarily from those notes, which makes them extremely convenient later on.

If you use them as memory cues, you filter the information down to some degree, which lets you concentrate on the class.
The catch is that when you sit down to study later, you’ll often need to consult the textbook or other materials.

It will also depend on your teacher’s style and the exams, but decide which type you mainly are.

If you’re the type who remembers most of what was covered in class, the latter approach is fine.
If you need repeated exposure to remember things, the former is probably better.

What you shouldn’t do is decide based on the fact that your notes will look nicer, or on a vague anxiety about missing some piece of information.

How you categorize information

Color coding in a notebook is really just a way of categorizing information.
In other words, once you’ve sorted information into categories, you can settle your color-coding rules simply by assigning a color to each category.

Before thinking about colors, you need to decide what kinds of information you actually need to distinguish.
I’ll describe my own categorization scheme below.

One way to categorize is important information versus everything else.
Then, how many levels of importance do you want?
Two levels, three levels, or more?

Besides importance, there are also headings, things the teacher said, things not in the textbook, supplementary information, and so on.

If you decide in advance how to provisionally handle exceptions when they come up, you can get through the moment without hesitating and refine your rules afterward.

Set your rules with these key points in mind and you’ll end up with your own ultimate note-taking method.

How I take notes

I’ve been talking in the abstract so far, so let me give my own note-taking method as a concrete example.

First, I’m the type who memorizes on the spot, so I treat my notes as supplementary and put the emphasis on absorbing information during class.
Since I don’t want to spend much time writing, I keep my rules extremely simple.

My categorization is just important versus not important.
Important information goes in red, everything else in black.

Since I write a lot in red, I use an erasable ballpoint pen (FriXion) for it.

For information that might be important, or that turns out to be important after I’ve written it, I underline it in red.

Offhand remarks and anecdotes from the teacher are valuable for recalling the content, so I jot them down small in black next to the related material.

Plenty of books have been published on how University of Tokyo students take notes, and they usually tell you to keep your notes neat—but that suits some people and not others.

It didn’t suit me.
(My handwriting isn’t nice to begin with, so I never got into the habit of reviewing my notes when studying for exams.)
And using many colors just made me hesitate, so by accepting that my notes are simply memos, I was able to find a method that works for me.

You can get good at studying even if your notes aren’t beautiful.

There’s no single correct way to take notes that works for everyone, so try various approaches and find a style that fits you—and that you enjoy!!