Study (for free) in Sweden

While reading a recent issue of New Scientist which got delivered to us (thanks New Scientist!) yesterday, I fell upon an add which brought me back to my college days. They weren’t that long ago….

Having graduated from Medicinal Chemistry, I onluy knew 1 thing, I didn’t want to work in a lab. I was uninterested in teh daily lab work during my research project in Madrid, and wanted to try something different. So if it wasn’t a PhD and it wasn’t a job in an industrial lab, what was it?

More CV tips

An interesting CV arrived in last week, something I had not seen before. At the bottom was a whole paragraph of tags, which the candidate was obviously hoping would be picked up by our database as it scanned the CV for key word skills. He CV would then show up in more searches which he then hoped woudl result in his CV being more visible to us and us calling him more often in relation to available opportunities. This is similar to “black-hat” webpage search optimisation which has since been discovered by Google. People would hide a multitude of keywords in the background text on their website, often in the same colour oas the background itself (say white words on a white background which would be picked up the the search bot). Needless to say, this did not look very good on the CV and didn’t strike me as being hugely professional, for someone that had a lot of experience.

Crisis as University Science Drop-Out Rates hit 40%

Recent reports have indicated that a very high percentage of university students are dropping out of science and technology courses after their first year in college. In DCU, heralded as the cutting-edge technology campus, drop-out rates of 39% have been reported, while in UCD a drop-out rate of 26% was reported and countrywide, the seven universities averaged 20%.

The Web 2.0 Recruitment Era

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, Technorati, MySpace, Social Media…. the list in endless… but what is all the fuss about and how can it find me a job, i hear you ask…

Web 2.0 is simply the catchy term for the next generation of internet technologies. In the same way mobile phones evolved from Analogue (088) to GSM (087) to GPRS the to 3G and HSPDA; from just making a standard call to making a video call, the internet is in a state of flux. A tidal wave of new rich applications are now available, enhancing the internet for the end-user. This has been made possible by the widespread peretration of broadband to the masses, combined with a reduction in the cost of computer hardware.

So how does it increase my chances of getting a job???