Today was the submission due-date for the online "entry sheet" papers (read: glorified cover letter) for Sony. I spent nearly 4 days working on writing out short essays in English that I would translate into Japanese for the questions I had to answer and I am going about doing this in a pretty interesting way.
Essays and Google Translate
Enter my friend, Google Translate, the best tool I have for writing essays. Though I haven't mentioned it, I have started translating some of the essays I post in to Japanese. It is no easy task for me to translate my essays in to Japanese, because the sentence structures I use in English are much more complicated compared to what I use in Japanese. This naturally poses limitations on what I am able to say in Japanese. While I may say that the translations that come out of google translate are not perfect, they more than suffice to provide me with a framework of text to fix and modify to create my Japanese version. Along the way, I learn new Japanese equivalents of the English expressions and vocabulary I use.
The fixing I do from the what I get from Google translate usually involves me moving statements around, changing predicates and reworking the essay. Google translate's main problem is that it sometimes has problems choosing the correct meaning of a word during translation. I have occasionally written the "internet" as the abbreviated "net" and what comes out is the literal translation of a "fish net" in Japanese. Suffice to say that some sentences read rather funny when it comes to "I was surfing the 'fish net' the other day..."
The other problem that Google translate has is that sometimes the translations are very literal and come off as unnatural in Japanese (when translating from English to Japanese). For example, in Japanese the main subject is often omitted and often assumed to be understood (which can make for interesting misunderstandings sometimes). When I write in English, especially in first person, I generally use the word "I" quite often to reinforce the first person point of view. Repetition of "I" multiple times in Japanese sentences is sometimes unnatural. There are of course other points I could point out but discussing all those points will take this post on a drawn out tangent. (Side note: I threw the last sentence into Google Translate and it did an OK job of differentiating the meanings of the words "point" and "points" which I used in different context, the sentence was kind of jumbled, however.)
Getting a job and why new grads in Japan don't use cover letters
So back to the cover letter for Sony. Recruitment into large companies in Japan (Toshiba, Sony, Hitachi and more) consists of writing a Japanese style cover letter, taking a "Standard Proficiency Index" (SPI) test and then going through several interviews with the company. Currently I am at cover letter stage.
The thing about applying for Japanese companies, is that you *don't* know exactly what you will be doing when you get hired. When you get hired, they may show you around the many different branches of the company, have you try out several different field or fling you to somewhere where they need people. It all depends on the company, but the main point is that you will not know what you will be doing at first.
This is quite different from the way Western countries work when it comes to getting a job -- a full job description is posted complete with a list of responsibilities and required skills and then you apply directly for those kinds of jobs. If there is a electrical engineering position for MP3 players and my responsibilities will be to do the circuit design, I would naturally highlight whatever experience I have working on circuit/hardware design (I have very little experience by the way), this might include what you did designing, making and testing the device. Hopefully you would also be able to say that what you made, worked!
The problem about writing cover letters for Japanese companies is that you can't be particularly concrete about what you write because you are not applying for a specific job position. What you are instead applying to is the company entity and what you write is based on your impression of what you think they might be doing or what the company might have told during one of their information sessions which many students attend.
This is a result of the company not expecting the students to enter the company with any skills or proficiencies, because job training happens after you get into the company. What happens is that the successful applicant picks a field that they think they are interested in and start from there. Since no job descriptions are provided, it is obvious that the usual cover letter method doesn't work. So how does a company get to know who you are?
Enter the Entry Sheet
The company wants to get to know their applicants a little before having both sides spend their time and money to come out to an interview. The best way for a company to get a first impression is in writing, but if there aren't any direct job positions for the applicant to apply for, what are they going to write about? The solution is to provide a form with questions for applicants to answer, and the name of this form is called "The Entry Sheet." So what do they ask ?
Q1. "What are your goals and dreams you wish to realize at our company?"
Q2. "What is your first choice for a department to join and why?"
Q3. "What is your second choice and why?"
Q4. "What research projects did you do at University?"
Q5. "What did you work towards to when you were at school?"
Aside from Q4, I thought that these questions were very open-ended and when you don't have concrete questions, it becomes hard to give concrete answers. What I think happens, is that people end up giving very abstract answers. You might as well be answering "what is your dream" at a beauty pageant and answering "world peace" (for those of you that catch the Miss Congeniality movie reference).
So, how would you answer open-ended questions, especially in a manner to make an impact on the reader (likely the human resources manager)? I will leave it to you as an interesting exercise.
And, fear not, I am not coping out. I put quite a lot of thought into these questions and already submitted my answers. Actually, my lab members were quite shocked/impressed at how I went about answering these questions. How my writing fell into the public domain of the lab was a result of me asking some of my Japanese friends to double check my Japanese and it became quite the spectacle, but that will be a talk for another time. I have still have much to write about but it is almost 2 am, time to sleep.
Open-ended questions are tough to answer... think about how you would answer them. If you want a challenge, post your answers in the comments section.
Hopefully, my next post will be a contrast between my answering style and what my peers wrote. They told me "no one in Japan would write the way you do, but it's pretty good! It must be the western influence in you" I still need to read what they wrote to compare the difference between me and them. I wouldn't accredit my writing style to writing cover letters as a result of "western culture," it's more like practice from all the cover letters I used to write (back in university for Co-op) that helped me get better. I know that I am considerably better than how I was before... but that too is a topic for another discussion.
Hmm, it seems that I have a lot of pending things to talk about just from this post. I also have about 5 other pending essay topics to write about as stored on a list on my computer. I'll get around to it... when I have time again. Now time to really stop. I've already written 3~4 more paragraphs compared to when I said I would stop, else I'll just go on forever.
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