Hassan Meeting

I got to meet with Hassan again today, which I was really excited about because our meetings are always a nice break from everything going on. There seem to be very few times when I stop everything that I am doing and just talk to someone, so I have enjoyed doing so.

Today Hassan and I talked about something that I am surprised took so long to come up. Specifically, for the first time we had an in-depth conversation about what we each other wanted to do for a career after school. I am surprised that it took Hassan and I so long to discuss this topic because it always seems that it is the one of the first things that comes up in a conversation with most people, though I guess we had so much stuff to talk about before that we had never gotten to it. While I had always known Hassan was studying accounting and that he had already done a significant amount of accounting classwork back in Saudi Arabia, I never knew how close our career ambitions were.  It turns out that both Hassan and I are very interested about going into the oil and gas field. I have accepted a job offer working for an oil and gas investment firm, but little did I know Hassan has been interested in joining the industry for years as well. While it makes sense that he would have a natural interest in the energy industry as he is from Saudi Arabia, it never dawned on me that he would be interested to work with oil. We talked for quite a long time about opportunities in the energy industry both domestic and abroad, and I could tell that while Hassan wanted to work in the industry, he had his doubts. When I asked if Hassan wanted to try to stay in America to work, he looked disappointed as he told me that he might want to, but a person who is fluent in English would beat him for a job every time. This was something that really took me back because I had never quite thought about competing for a job from that standpoint before. While I studied hundreds of pages for days on end to prepare for many of my interviews, I never considered how hard it must be fore international students who not only need to study those same several hundred pages, but might also have difficulty with the language itself. I think interviews can be hard and intimidating enough as it is, but I couldn’t imagine how difficult they might be when language is potentially an issue. However, I tried to cheer Hassan up by telling him about all the opportunities there must be for people who speak both Arabic and English and want to enter the energy industry. I told him that while there are a lot of people who speak either English or Arabic and want to work with oil, few people that want to work in the industry can speak both languages! I could tell that this was something Hassan had not really considered before, as he immediately began to seriously consider what I had said.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Hassan because the topic we discussed was so spontaneous and something I didn’t plan on talking about, though we both had a great time discussing it! It is always fun to unexpectedly find areas that you have in common with someone.