Careers
Career
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Not to be confused with job
Is a professional life path (or tree)
Can involve many companies and positions
College is just the foundation
– Hopefully we’ve taught you the base-knowledge
you’ll need
• Much discussion on what we should be doing
Career
• You are now looking for your first position
• 2-5+ years work experience
– Where do you start?
• Entry level position means you wont do that
job for the rest of your life
What do You Want to do?
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If you had a million dollars
Prioritize your goals
What do you do in your free time?
Why did you choose your project for this
course?
• Where do you want to be in 5 years?
– 10 years?
What do You Want to do?
• What do you do in the summer?
– Internship
– REU
– Played Counterstrike
– Non-technical summer job only for the cash
• What do you do with the cash (do that)
Enjoy What you do
And you’ll never work a day in your life
Decide What to do
• How are you going to get where you’re going?
• Are you wiling to do something you don’t want to
do to get there?
– Think long term
– Your career will be 20+ years
• But you know this already
– You’re spending 4 years to make your future better
• How far are you willing to go?
– Take an intro job with poor benefits and mismatching
atmosphere for experience in your desired field?
Network
• Not sure about an industry/company/position
– Ask someone
– Most people love to talk about their careers
• Sometimes to a fault
Entrepreneur
• Are you willing to take a job to build up seed
funding?
• If not, start now!
• No easier time to be an entrepreneur than
during college
• Honestly answer this one question
– What is stopping you from starting?
• If this is really something you want to do
– Identify roadblocks and remove them
Entrepreneur
• Most important factor for success
– Execution
• The best software can fail as a business with
poor execution
• Known ideas done well can be very successful
– Web search
– Communication
– Course management system (still waiting on this
one)
Career Progression
• Within an organization
– What is the upside of a position
– Can be limited in small organizations
• Within an industry
– Much more potential if you’re willing to move
around
– Can make you a risky hire if you move too much
Career Outlook
• If you’ve been paying attention for 3.5 years
and did you’re homework
– You should be able to find a good job
• In fact
– Companies are looking for you!
Name Brand Companies
• There will be a long line at the name brand
booths on Wednesday
• There will be short/no lines at many other
companies
– They are trying to recruit you!
– They have jobs for talented students
Space
• We live in a world where governments spend
large amounts of money to see how high up
we can go
• The people hiring you likely love tech for techs
sake
Resume Tips – Compiled from Piazza
• Always submit as pdf
– A surprising number of round 2 submissions are
still doc
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Keep it to a page!
Make you objective awesome, or remove it
Don’t list a skill you’re not comfortable with
Don’t claim expertise unless you’re an expert
Be consistent, especially in formatting
Don’t include your physical address
– Or do include your physical address
Resume Tips – Compiled from Piazza
• 2-3 bullet points per work experience/project
• Bullet points should:
– Start with a strong action word
– Highlight the skills used
– Mention impact
– Quantify whenever possible
Sample Description Bullet
• "Authored Python script to clean up stale log
files; once set up to run as a cron, it saved an
average of two hours of maintenance, each
week” –Mack Ward
Class Interview Question
• Check if two strings are anagrams of each
other.
• ex: “anagram”, “nag a ram”
Class Interview Question
• Check if an integer is a power of 2
Class Interview Question - Resumes
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n Students submitting
k Reviewers
r Rounds
r<k<n
• Schedule 1 reviewer to each student for each
round
• No reviewer is assigned to the same student in
multiple rounds
• All assignments should made uniformly at
random for each round