Shawn Lankton Online

In this three-part series I’ll give you a how-to for getting an interview, preparing for it, and dazzling the interviewers once you’re across the table. These are the main topics we’ll cover:

• Part 1: Branding Yourself and Making Making a “Wow” Resume
• Part 2: Preparing for Your Case Interview to Get Bulletproof
• Part 3: Talking about Your Experience and Sounding like a Bad-ass

Leaving academia and joining consulting firms is a something many PhD students (myself included) are getting interested in. Firms like McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain & Associates once hired mostly MBAs but are now branching out to hire MDs, lawyers, and PhDs.

I wanted to make a big impact with the skill I learned during my PhD. I got excited when I heard about consulting because it promises just that. In the next three parts, I’ll take you through the big lessons I learned while preparing and interviewing: How to get an interview, how to nail the case, and how to dazzle them with your experience.

Part 1: Branding Yourself and Making Making a “Wow” Resume gives you pointers to polish that scruffy science look off your C.V. and generally control your “personal brand” so that interviewers are impressed with you long before you walk in the door.

Part 2: Preparing for Your Case Interview to Get Bulletproof talks about how to approach the case and how to practice so that you can shine while others look dull. I’ll give you some simple exercises that will improve the structure and creativity of the “case” portion of your interview.

Part 3: Talking about Your Experience and Sounding like a Bad-ass covers an important and often overlooked portion of a consulting interview… talking about yourself! I know you have some amazing stories to tell. This sections shows how to make your stories say the right things about you.

Please enjoy!

Disclaimer: I recently went through the application and interview process with a top firm, came out with an offer, and signed it! In this series, I share my experience and give some ideas for people on a similar path. However, at the time of writing (July 2009), I do not have any inside information on how any company conducts their hiring. These are just my thoughts!

This is the first part of “A PhD’s Guide to Getting a Consulting Job,” because personal branding and resume building can help you the most! Having a great resume and a powerful personal brand is necessary to get in the door, and if you do it right, you may have the job before you even start talking.

First I’ll talk about how to build your brand, then I’ll share my tips on resume writing.    Click to continue →

So far in the “PhD’s Guide to Getting a Consulting Job,” we’ve covered how to work on your personal brand and write a resume that will get you an interview. Now, it’s time to get bulletproof for the interview itself.

Case interviews are an interview tool that consulting companies use to gauge how your analytical skills. Essentially, the case interview involves answering an open-ended question about a business problem. The interviewer gives some background on a (hypothetical) company that needs help. Then the candidate talks through an analysis and solution.

I’m going to show you how to rock a case interview.    Click to continue →

We have talked about how to get an interview and how to nail the case section. The last step in the “PhD’s Guide to Getting a Consulting Job” is discussing your personal experience in a way that is clear, compelling, and shows that you’ve got what it takes to be a consultant.    Click to continue →

Even people who “hate” brussels sprouts love this dish! So get ready… Roasting is a wonderful way to cook veggies, and brussels sprouts are no exception. They taste like spicy potato chips, and they’re so good for you that your mother will approve!

It takes some time, but these sprouts are well-worth it. They will fill you up and make you say “wow” with every bite.

This dish has become one of my staples. You’re going to love it!    Click to continue →

CNN and FOX news can’t stop talking about it.
You may have seen someone ‘tweet’ in real-life.
You feel like you might be missing out.

Despite all the hype, twitter seems unbelievably stupid…

I thought so too when I first tried out the service, but by taking a different approach it is starting to seem like a useful tool.

If you’ve never used twitter: It is essentially the same technology as facebook status updates. Short messages from people you ‘follow’ get collected in a single stream for you to quickly review when you’ve got a spare second.

Twitter as a micro-blog

I keep this blog to write long-ish articles and posts about topics that interest me and that I think can help you, the reader. However, on a good day there are lots more ideas and discoveries than time. Enter, the microblog.

Twitter provides a medium to post very short ideas, comments, and links to interesting content found elsewhere. I endeavor to make each tweet a stub for a potential blog post… just without my elegant prose. That means every time I post something I want it to be useful to the reader, not just some pointless info about my life. This suddenly transforms twitter from a self-indulgent distraction into the realm of useful tools for recording ideas and adding value.

Lots of people I follow use this same formula.

Twitter as ubiquitous content capture

When you find a link, hear a quote, or get an idea that you’d like to remember and share, you may not be near a computer. Twitter can be your ubiquitous information capture tool in those cases. By sending an SMS or updating twitter via iPhone the content gets sent to a centralized, searchable, shareable place to be found or referenced later.

Twitter as a social tool

Right now my list of followers and follow-ees is rather short. To really leverage the power of the medium there need to be lots of connections between friends and colleagues interested in similar subject matter. This gives you the opportunity to get quick answers and collaborations by asking questions of your followers and responding to their questions.

You should follow me on twitter (@shawnlankton).

If you want to see my microblog without joining twitter, an embedded version can be accessed via the μblog tab at the top of the page.

Any other ideas on how to use twitter? Leave a comment.

Knowing about new research in my field helps keep my work informed and relevant. However, I rarely remember to log into IEEE Xplore, Springer, or Science Direct to see what’s new in top computer vision journals. Recently, I saw mention of using RSS to keep up with research on Productive Scholar.

It took a bit of searching, but eventually I found RSS feeds for many of the journals I’m interested in and loaded them into google reader. It is now quick to scroll through new abstracts as papers appear on-line prior to publication. Below are links to RSS feeds for some computer vision journals I’m keeping up with.

RSS Feeds for Computer Vision Journals

Finding RSS Feeds for Other Journals

It takes a bit of hunting sometimes, but I can’t imagine that a journal would not have RSS these days. IEEE Journals are easy to find, and I found that inezha.com was a good resource for finding some of the other ones I have listed.

Any good feeds I missed?
Other good ideas for keeping current?

Leave them in the comments.

When I really need to concentrate I listen to brown noise. I find that it boosts my productivity and keeps me from getting distracted by sounds around me. This is most useful in coffee shops or noisy offices, but I even do this when it’s quiet.

Brown noise is similar to white noise; it sounds like random static. However, brown noise is at a slightly lower pitch so it’s easier to listen to. That means that I can work for hours without hurting my ears!

You can download some free random noise MP3s to play on your computer or iPod, or listen to some right from your browser. Both work great.

This works better than my previous method (using ear plugs) because the sounds aren’t just blocked, they’re all scrambled up by the static. I get so much input from my ears that my brain ignores sound all together and focuses on work!

Anybody else tried this? How else do you keep focused?

Active contours are a method of image segmentation. They are well-loved for their accuracy, ease of implementation, and nice mathematical underpinnings. However, a full level-set implementation can be quite slow, especially when dealing with large data! Here are some tips to speed things up. By combining these ideas and solid programming techniques I’ve been able to get active contour trackers running at hundreds of frames per second!

Use Fast Level-Sets

Start by using a fast level-sets implementation that minimizes the number of required computations [code]. This will already save a huge number of computations per iteration and speed things up quite a bit!

Create better initializations.

The farther the initial contour is from its final position, the more computations must be done for the contour to converge. Hence, if you can start the contour in almost the right place, you’ll drastically reduce the time needed for segmentation. You can use prior knowledge, user input, or other segmentation techniques to create a rough guess that is close to the right answer. Another initialization that can leads to quick initialization is ‘bubbles’ on an evenly-spaced grid.

Use a multi-scale approach.

This is a way to quickly get good initializations using active contours. Say your data is MxN. Instead of segmenting the full data set, downsample the data so that you are dealing with an (M/8)x(N/8) volume. The segmentation should run much quicker on the smaller volume. Next, upsample the result back to MxN and use this as an initialization for the full data. The idea is that the time saved on the full segmentation by having a good estimate based on downsampled data will make up for the time needed to downsample, segment on the small data, and upsample.

Use approximate active contours.

Using an approximate solution for all or part of your segmentation can be helpful. As in 2 and 3, you can use an approximate active contour technique to quickly get close to the right answer. Then you can use an accurate level sets implementation to get the right answer quickly. Alternatively, the discrete methods can work quite well alone! James Malcolm proposed a nice method in “Fast Approximate Surface Evolution in Arbitrary Dimension” [code].

Use another technique entirely.

Active contours are “variational,” so they give nice, principled solutions with analytic geometry, etc. However, if you just want fast segmentations, other techniques such as thresholding/morphology, graph cuts, region growing, etc. can all be viable solutions.

Any other tips or links to good implementations? Leave them in the comments.

I love zucchini, and I usually just slice it up and stir-fry it with some soy sauce and red pepper flakes (which is delicious!). Yesterday, I decided to get fancy and make something worth showing off… zucchini-stuffed-zucchini. It turned out great! The filling is rich and hearty, and when it is paired with the roasted zucchini shell the taste is savory and refreshing.

Best of all, it was super-easy! Read on to find out how to make it.    Click to continue →