Last semester (Fall ‘08) was one of the busiest I’ve ever had. Not only was I working part time at GTRI and taking classes as usual, but I was a TA and also going to career fairs and on job interviews. It was a great experience and I made some great connections, but tiring to say the least.

I attended the Georgia Tech career fair and immediately began meeting with recruiters and getting positive responses from my resume. In turn I was able to land interviews with GEICO, Bloomberg, and Oracle.

Bloomberg: The Bloomberg interview was first and it was an experience I’ll never forget. This was the first CS technical interview I’ve ever done and I was completely unprepared for what was about to go down. I interview with 2 developers from Bloomberg and they started right in on asking me technical CS questions. It basically felt like I was taking an oral final exam for the entire CS curriculum. Needless to say, I didn’t do too well and I received an email from them saying I wasn’t being selected for second round interviews.

GEICO: The position at GEICO was for a Web Developer at their corporate office in Chevy Chase, MD (5 mins. from D.C.). The on campus interview went well as I have most of my experience in Web Development and it wasn’t a technical interview anyways. So, they asked me to do a second round phone interview with the head of the Internet Business Unit. That interview also went well given my experience and so they asked me to come out to Chevy Chase for an on site interview. I flew out to Baltimore Washington International and then grabbed the rental car and headed to the hotel. The next morning I went to the corporate office and met everyone. All on site interviews also went well and I was feeling good about a possible offer. Well, I still haven’t received an offer, but I’ve been in contact with the recruiter and she informs me they’re still conducting interviews and I’m still a candidate. So, we’ll see what happens with that.

Oracle: The first round Oracle interview was on campus and pretty brief. This was for a consulting job where I would basically fly all over the country and work on various consulting projects for Oracle’s customers. The interview went well and I was asked to have an on site interview at their Buckhead corporate offices. The night before the interviews we were invited to a dinner so we could meet some of the interviewers. The dinner was nice and there were a lot of graduates from different schools and with different majors there. It wasn’t just technical grads there which I found surprising. The next morning I went to the on site interviews. There were to be 2 interviews and a “test” more or less. The test was comprised of 2 questions. The first was a consulting type question (non-technical) and the second was geared towards CS majors and contained a question about setting up a database, creating ER diagrams, and then writing a SQL statement for a specific query. Don’t ask me where I pulled ER diagram concepts from my brain, but I did. Also, the SQL statement looked correct too, I felt like I was possessed. The first second round interview was non-technical and went well, then the second second round interview was technical. I think I did well on both so I was excited to possibly get an offer. I ended up getting an offer, but with the travel and hectic schedule I didn’t think the salary was sufficient, so I declined the offer.

After the career fair interviews were finished, I actually found opportunities for 2 more interviews through connections and also on site recruiting events. I was able to get interviews with the NSA and Google.

NSA: I was excited about opportunities at the NSA because of the job descriptions. Basically exploiting networks (aka paid hacker). So, I went to their recruiting event and setup an interview time for the next day. I conducted the interview and seemed to impress the recruiter who gave me a condition job offer on the spot. A conditional job offer just means, we’ll give you an offer, and if you pass the extensive security screening, you’re hired. Well, I received the offer and I felt the salary was a little insufficient, so I declined the offer.

Google: Well, this is the dream job of course. I was able to land an interview thanks to the help of Joel Webber, a developer at Google who came and spoke at one of my classes about Google Web Toolkit. I knew what to expect from the interview, basically another extensive CS knowledge test along with a problem solving section. There were 2 interviews, back-to-back days. I was actually a little pessimistic going into the interview, but knew I would try my best to answer their questions. So, the interviews happened and as I thought, tough questions with less than adequate answers from me. Shortly after I was sent an email that didn’t necessisarily decline me, but basically said they weren’t going to do second round interviews with me.

So where does this leave me? Well, I was able to get job offers from Oracle, NSA, maybe GEICO, my current job (GTRI) and I also was left with a lot of great interview experience for the future. So, I believe grad school is the way to go. I wanted to have a good salary coming out of college given that I’m getting a late start in industry. I’ve applied to Georgia Tech to get the Master’s in Computer Science and will be awaiting word from them. I intend on doing the Fastrack program which allows CS undergrads to get into grad school at Tech with less requirements. I will update with their decision, so wish me luck.

CS 3220 – Processor Design – B

CS 3300 – Software Engineering – A

CS 3210 – Operating Systems Design – A

CETL 2000 – TA Prep – Pass (Could only take it as Pass/Fail)

CS 4903 – TA Class – A

Processor Design was a surprise B. I really understood everything and thought I did well on the final. I think the final project is what did me in. We had to completely implement the processor for our ISA on our hardware. I thought we made good progress, but we didn’t fully complete the project. Either way, I’m happy with my grades.

One more semester to go!!

As the 1 or 2 of you who read my blog know I recently created my own wordpress theme. Being that I’m NOT a CSS guru and I’ve pretty much taught myself everything I know about CSS, I made a few mistakes along the way. Pretty much everything went well, except my site fails XHTML validation (click the link at the bottom.. FAIL). So it turns out one of my problems is using ids in my divs vs. using classes.

I’ve always been under the impression that an id was used for most divs, and other tags for that matter, and classes were just used sparingly. But to my surprise, ids should only be used once on a page while classes are used in multiple locations. After pondering this for a bit, it does seem to make logical sense to have it this way.

For instance, lets say I had a container div and a entry div. The container just wraps the entire page so you could, for example, have the layout constantly centered and the entry wraps different comment posts on a page. Since the container is used only once on the page we would want to define this with an id and since the entry is used in multiple comments we would want to define this with a class.

<div id="container">
  <h1>Some container heading</h1>
  <div class="entry">
    <h3>Some entry heading</h3>
    <p>Some comment</p>
  </div>
  <div class="entry">
    <h3>Some other entry heading</h3>
    <p>Some other comment</p>
  </div>
</div>

The same should be done for other tags as well, such as spans, p tags, headings, etc. After I fix these problems on my site I will retry the XHTML validation and see what happens. Good luck to everyone else.

Where have I been this past month?

Well, this is definitely the busiest semester I’ve ever had at Georgia Tech. To go along with that, I attended a career fair and lined up a few interviews in the process. I’m still trying to decide between grad school and the work force, so I decided I’d see what opportunities are out there. So far I’ve had interviews with Bloomberg, GEICO, and Oracle. I had a second round interview with GEICO and I have a second round interview scheduled with Oracle.

We’re half way through the semester now, so I have a good feel for my classes.

Processor Design (CS 3220) is the most time consuming but also the most interesting class this semester. We’re basically implementing an entire ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) on a piece of actual hardware using Verilog. My partner and I implemented the ISA in perl, which is good, because I’ve been wanting to learn perl.

Software Engineering (CS 3300) is interesting as well. We’ve built a program from the ground up doing all documentation before actually coding (Waterfall Process). Now we’re coding the application and it does seem easier to code considering the amount of detail that went into the planning. I believe in our next project we’ll be doing the reverse.

OS Design (CS 3210) is different than I thought it would be. There’s a lot of lecturing and not as much hands on lab work. Part of the blame has been the software we’re using for our simulations, but now that it’s fixed, we still haven’t done as much lab work as I had hoped we would. Hopefully it’ll pick up in the second half of the semester.

Finally, TAing for CS 1316 has been fun. I enjoy teaching the recitations (assuming I’m prepared) and also teaching students in the one-on-one office hours. I’m determined to help non-CS majors learn Java!!

The CETL 2000 class, for first time TAs, is informative, but I could think of better things to do with an extra hour in the morning (zzzzzz).

In unrelated school / web news, THE TAMPA BAY RAYS ARE IN THE ALCS!!!!!!

I’ve been a Rays fan since I’ve been in college (~4 years) and it’s amazing to see how far they’ve come. From worst record in baseball and finishing last in all but 1 season since they’ve been a team (in the 1 season, they finished second to last and open champaigne bottles to celebrate not being in last) to winning the AL East and having a chance to go to the World Series. That’s quite an amazing feat and shows how any team can bring the right people together, work hard, and get things done without having to buy their way to a championship, even though it hasn’t worked for the Yankees for a while.

Yellow Jackets are off to a good start too, looks like Paul Johnson’s offense is starting to come together. I predicted we’d have 3 turnovers per game due to the amount of tossing and quick inside handoffs that go along with the triple option, but so far they’ve proved me wrong. I hope they keep it up!

Until next time (zzzzzzz)

It’s a little late, but I went to the opening game vs. Jacksonville State last week. While JSU is not a formidable opponent, it was quite a show put on by Paul Johnson’s spread, triple option offense scoring 41 points. The defense didn’t miss a beat either giving up only 7 points in most of the game and 7 in the last minute. It was hard to really analyze the entire game since we were sitting behind one of the end zones. I’ll put my coaches hat on if I can watch them on tv against Boston College, our first real test.