Job Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

What's With the Big Pause?

When I first decided to create an online blog I wanted to avoid a common pitfall of many other blogs: lack updates. While there were a few empty months in 2009, it feels like a did a good job with regular posts every week or so... Until the New Year rolled around. This is the first blog post in over six months.

Starting in mid-November a few things changed that really impacted my regular blogging. The first, and most obvious one, was winter. While I do enjoy winter adventuring, driving to the Upper Peninsula through the snow to come up with fresh content for the hiking side of my blog was something I decided to avoid. That, coupled with decrease daylight and other seasonal blues, dampened my motivation to write new hiking blogs.

Another problem that I ran into was a decrease in time. Not only did I start working later hours in November at my full-time job, but I started a large contract project that ate up any free time I normally reserved for my personal site development. My site was half rewritten at this time - I was starting to implement a model-view-controller framework (that was later scrapped for my current, very awesome framework) - and I was trying to concentrate on too many independent web project at the same time.

So, to sum that all up, I simply...

• Tags:
• my site
• job

New Job and Car

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. To provide a bit of back story, I've been living in Appleton, WI with my girlfriend's parents working a few different contract jobs since May of 2009. While our income was enough to cover a few bills and loan payments, freelance web development wasn't earning enough to cover moving out, so I started applying for fulltime positions in the local area.

In the beginning of August I headed out east with the Reynolds family for a wedding in Ocean City, WA. This trip involved several incredible dinners and a visit to our nation's capital on top of meeting some of Katie's extended family. Near the end of the trip I received an email about a job offer from De Pere, only twenty minutes from Appleton. SparkNET, the founding company of EzineArticles, wanted me as a web developer, a position I quickly accepted.

I've only been working at SparkNET for a few days now, but so far it seems to be a great fit. The atmosphere is very welcoming and open, and the other programmers are very good at what they do. The sites I'll be working on receive high traffic loads and are (or will be) setup in a MVC format, two areas of web programming I could use some more experience in.

Since...

• Tags:
• saturn ion
• job
• sparknet
• katie
• wisconsin
• vacation

Life After College

I was never worried about finding a job after college. Both degrees I undertook (physics and math) have severely limited job opportunities compared to other Michigan Tech degrees (computer sciences, engineering, etc), but I was too caught up in student life to worry about a career. Working through both high school and college, I figured that finding a good job after graduation would be easy.

The career fair options at the university always bombed for my degree (most attending businesses were only interested in engineers) and, with only weeks left, I applied for several jobs involving web development at Michigan Tech. The interview and application process was over in a short time and I had two job offers - and I took the more promising one. Little did I know that I'd be fired in ten months with even less opportunities available to me.

After being fired, I applied for several dozen jobs across the country. Not only was I excited about a brand new experience, but I wanted to leave Michigan and my university behind. With the bad economy and my limited experience, though, few employers got back to me (not many companies want to fly a web developer with less than three years experience across the nation). When my lease in Houghton ended in late April, Katie and I decided...

• Tags:
• job
• mtu
• katie

Moving to Wisconsin

After losing my job at Michigan Tech and testing out the job market in Houghton for a month, Katie and I decided that it was time to move. Several options presented themselves, including Seattle and Chicago, where friends offered free housing for several months until jobs and permanent housing could be found. We decided to move to Appleton, WI with Katie's parents after much discussion.

Over the last several years of dating Katie, we had visited her parents plenty of times both before and with Logan. Not only did we enjoy our time in Appleton, but they were very understanding of our relationship and current position. Also, even though I had applied to plenty of job opportunities across the nation, the only interviews and interested companies I had contact with where in the Milwaukee and Green Bay area. It made sense to move to a familiar location that seemed promising for a future career.

I did have some hesitations on moving to Wisconsin, mostly because I was raised in Michigan. I don't know many people or attractions within the state, and there aren't square miles of empty wilderness, like the rugged Huron Mountains or Ottawa National Forest of the Upper Peninsula, near Appleton.

These few negatives were unimportant to our immediate needs for a house and...

• Tags:
• job
• katie
• wisconsin

Getting Fired

I was hired to work for Michigan Technological University after a short, informal process immediately after graduating in the spring of 2008. Starting under the department of Auxiliary Technologies as a beginning web developer, I was the sole manager for dozens of websites and web applications. After ten months of complaint-free work, I was fired from my position in an extremely negative manner.

During my employ at Michigan Tech, I don't feel that I was the perfect employee. When a friend of mine was hospitalized after a camping accident, I took a week's worth of emergency leave after sending my boss and colleagues a brief e-mail explaining the situation. I usually showed up to work early, especially during the summer, so that I could leave early to work around the house or go hiking with my dog. There were several projects I worked on that fell behind schedule, sometimes due to my inability to keep up with a large workload. However, while I admit these shortcomings as an employee, none of them were listed as a reason for my termination.

Two of my larger projects failed during my last few months of my employment that, according to my boss, were the cause of his decision. The first one was a youth programs application that accepted online applications and payments...

• Tags:
• job
• mtu