Category: Learning & Career

Introduction

Job hunting is the first big wall you have to climb on the way into working life.
Unlike the schoolwork you have done up to now, it has no single right answer, and it requires you to find the best possible answer within a relationship between people — something most of us have never tried before.

Because of that, I have heard friends say all sorts of things: that they don’t know what the right answer is, that they don’t know who they really are, that the whole thing is just a game of credentials or luck.

And yet, haven’t you had the strange experience of seeing someone from the same school, in much the same situation as you, somehow collect one job offer after another?

As I said above, in job hunting “people choose 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 makes you stand out from others.

So this time I would like to write a series of blog posts, titled “Job Hunting That Earns You Points,” about going after the job you want proactively.

Let me be upfront: I am currently enrolled in a doctoral program, so I have never actually done a job search 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.
And since friends and junior students often come to me for advice about job hunting, I think I am in a position to look objectively at the pitfalls that many people tend to fall into.

Given that background, this series may differ in many ways from the usual job-hunting guide.
You don’t need to take on board everything I say, but I hope it will be of some help in your job search.

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 while giving job-hunting advice is that, with that kind of image in mind, many people unconsciously assume that they are being scored by subtraction.

In other words: everyone starts with 100 points when they first apply, then “the interview answers were so-so, minus 1 point,” “the university isn’t prestigious, minus 5 points,” and in the end the people with the highest scores get hired. Something like that.

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

In that case, even if you have your own evaluation criteria, what you would weigh most heavily is the person themselves: whether you work well together, whether they have the ability, whether they might cause trouble. Your focus goes to their character.
It’s not that subtraction plays no role at all, but rather everyone starts at zero points when they apply, and then “they have well-formed ideas of their own, plus 1 point,” “they’re good at planning, plus 5 points,” with the highest scorer being chosen in the end. In other words, the decision is made by addition, isn’t it?

Because of this gap in how the choosing side and the chosen side implicitly think about selection, it very often happens that the chosen side fails to properly meet what the choosing side actually wants.

Common examples: assembling an application essay like a jigsaw puzzle out of several essays that got other people hired in the past, or saying only safe, inoffensive things in an interview that anyone might say.

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

Throughout this series, approaching your job search as a points-earning exercise will be the central idea.

Who Gets Chosen?

Next, let’s think about the people who get chosen.
What kind of person does a company choose?

Here are a few examples that come to mind.

・People from prestigious universities
・People who led a student club
・People with unusual experiences
・People who have won awards in sports or research
・People with strong communication skills

And so on.

In my personal view, to be chosen, the two most important elements are:

・Having a defining characteristic that leaves an impression
・Being someone people want to work with

I believe these two elements matter most.

Evaluators have to assess a huge number of applicants, so if you haven’t left an impression, you simply won’t come to mind when the decisions are made.
And even if you do come to mind, you won’t be hired unless they want to work with you.

In job hunting, people are always told to do thorough self-analysis and company research.
Those two exercises exist precisely to satisfy these two elements.

Self-analysis → Having a defining characteristic that leaves an impression
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 you should be looking.

Closing

I plan to keep publishing posts like this one 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 and contribute a properly formatted version.

People say all kinds of things about the study notes of smart people—that they’re beautiful, easy to read, and so on.
But when you try to imitate that and take neat notes in class, it often ends up being nothing more than a copy of what’s on the board, or it takes too much time, and things just don’t go well.

The most important thing about taking notes is finding and mastering a note-taking 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 these 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’re taking notes during a class or lecture, information is basically flowing past you.
To take notes under those conditions, the key is getting things down on paper quickly.

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

So your rules shouldn’t be the kind that make you stop and think, “Wait, which rule was that again?” They need to let you pick colors and decide how to write things 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 in your notes changes depending on whether you use them 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 a corresponding amount of time.
But since you can then study primarily from those notes, they’re extremely convenient later on.

If you use them as memory cues, you filter the information down to a degree, which lets you concentrate on the class.
The problem is that when you go to study later, you often need to consult your textbook or other materials.

It may also depend on your teacher’s lecture style and the exams, but decide first and foremost which type you are.

If you’re the type who can remember most of what was covered in class, the latter approach should be fine.
If you’re someone who needs repetition to remember things, the former is probably better.

What you shouldn’t do is decide based on things like “my notes look nicer this way” or “I feel uneasy leaving anything out.”

How you categorize information

Color-coding in your notes is really just a way of categorizing information.
In other words, once you’ve sorted information into categories, all you have to do is assign a color to each one, and your color-coding rules are set.

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 by important versus unimportant information.
Then, how finely do you divide things by importance?
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 record exceptions when they come up, you can get through the moment without hesitating and then refine your rules afterward.

If you set your rules with these key points in mind, you’ll end up with the ultimate note-taking method tailored to you.

How I Take Notes

I’ve been speaking conceptually up to now, so let me offer 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 whether information is important or not.
Important information goes in red, everything else in black.

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

For information that might be important, or things I realize are important after writing them down, I underline them in red.

Anecdotes the teacher mentions are useful for recalling the content, so I jot them down small in black near the related material.

Books like “Note-Taking Techniques of University of Tokyo Students” get published, and they usually tell you to take beautiful notes—but that works for some people and not for others.

It didn’t work for 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 since using many colors just made me hesitate, I found my own approach by accepting that my notes are simply memos.

Even if your notes aren’t beautiful, you can still get good at studying.

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