New Portfolio!

So I finally decided to make a very important investment and purchased a legit domain. No more of the co.nr mess. I paid like $38 for a whole year of web hosting and got the domain for free at GoDaddy.com. Not too bad. Now you can Google my name and actually find my website on the first page (along with my Twitter and Facebook). It's alyssanguyen.com. Just so you know.

The whole redesigning of my portfolio took 3 days. This is what my old portfolio looked like:

Now it looks like this:

In case you're curious, my new design was inspired by the Nike Lebron X shoes in the "Canary" color. Looks like this: 

Yeah. I know some people don't like those shoes, but if I had money then I wouldn't mind getting those. They would be considerably heavier than my current shoes, the Adidas Crazy Shadows, though.

For those who don't know, I make my websites purely from HTML. It's what I'm most familiar with. So while it looks like what you see about now, for days it looked like this to me:

So much fun. I think my next investment now is to make myself some business cards. Or at least that's what my social media marketing professor is suggesting. Fingers crossed that my investments pay off and I can get a full time job. For now, I guess I'll just be a server at the Gaylord Texan Hotel. Oh yeah. I guess I forgot to mention that. I have a part-time job now! It's a seasonal job at the Gaylord Texan's Paradise Springs. It's basically like a Hawaiian Falls except for high class people. Let's hope this job gets me some good tips, unlike at freaking Studio Movie Grill. 

Hard Work Wasted

Alright. So I recently quit my job at Studio Movie Grill. Even though I've only been there for 2 months, I think that was more than enough. It's the most rigorous job I've ever had. I mean, seriously. You're scheduled to come in a certain time and then you stay until the manager feels like they don't need you anymore. Most days, I end up working 10 hours. On top of that, your pay is based on tip. Some days you end up averaging below minimum wage. With the running back and forth between the kitchen and several different theaters and dealing difficult people, minimum wage is not enough to make me stay. I'm even tired of going home at like 2 or 3 in the morning. Plus, there are some people who complain at work and make things more difficult by not showing up when they need to. I know that my managers felt like I was a great employee and praised me often for my hard work but I'm tired. It sucks having to let them down. I've had a few people try and convince me to stay by telling me that promotions are coming soon and stuff, but I can't wait for that. I'd be dead by then. I will miss the friends that I made at work, though. I'm actually gonna miss my managers, too. I actually know people outside of thieu nhi. Shocking.

But yeah. Regardless of how hard my job was, I would've had to leave eventually after graduation. After college, a part time job as a server is not going to cut it. My favorite manager Barrett made an offer for me to come back and work seasonally if I wanted to. We'll have to see about that. 

Welcome to the Real World, Alyssa!

So I haven't really written a post in a while, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know why. Anyways, this is a just a little update about me getting thrown into the real world after living in my ivory tower so long. Recently, I've started a job at the new Studio Movie Grill that opened on Spring Valley. Honestly, I kinda hate it. I work as a server so my pay is really unstable since most of my pay depends on tips. Base pay is only $2.13 an hour, which is average for a waiter job. Everything else is tips, tips, tips. It's like the first week that this location has opened so the managers kind of overstaffed just cuz most of us are new and might need help. The bad thing is that the more people that we have in our little team, the more times we have to split our tip pool. Saturday I walked away with an okay amount of money for 10+ hours of work. Sunday was okay. Monday I only walked away with $10 for the 6 hours I was there. They put me in a 6-man team for a 2-man job. Bleh.

Another thing I hate about working at SMG is the fact that we don't have a definite end time for our shifts. They give us a start time and they'll keep us as they need us. Saturday I started at 10am and got stuck at work til 8pm. Sucked balls.

At least the people I work with are pretty cool (for the most part). I just hope that everyone I work with is reliable. Sunday I had a team member barely do anything. Every time I saw him, he was in the kitchen taking a drink break. And he walked away with an even share of the tip pool even though he didn't do scrap. Seriously? Ugh.

On to life after college. So you know how I went to a job fair back in September with Hien? Well, I got a call back from the Reynolds and Reynolds place. Went through an interview on Skype and got to the second step of the interview process. If I get this job, I'll be set the moment I graduate from college. The thing is, I know nothing about what to ask for for a yearly salary. It says on most of the websites I've been to that the average starting salary of a graphic designer is around $30,000 a year. Landing a job at Reynolds and Reynolds means that I would have to pack up and move to Houston. Can I live on $30,000 a year alone in Houston? Maybe. My parents were making a huge deal out of it saying that I should've tried to push for more and whatever. Ugh. I don't know what to do.

In the meantime, while that second step is going through, I'm still trying to find a job closer to home. I applied for an internship at the Richards Group and got rejected. Now I applied for a full-time position as a designer. If I can land this, then I can drop Reynolds and Reynolds and live at home and stay close to the people I know. I also applied for a graphic design internship for the Dallas Mavs. If I can land either of those jobs, I'll be fine.

So the moral of the story is, start applying for jobs before you graduate so that you'll have something lined up as soon as you get your diploma. That way, you won't have to bum around for a few months after graduation waiting for a job offer. The second moral is that waiter jobs are hard. Don't do it.