Adam Reineke

Our academic adviser sent out the following e-mail this morning:

For your information: ALL of the seniors (there are 18) graduating in Computer Science Spring/Summer’11 and in Software Engineering (5 for whom I was the academic advisor) have completed the Outcomes Assessment questionnaire.  One of the things asked of these individuals was the company offer they accepted or the graduate school admission they have accepted.

The problem faced by the seniors this semester was which job offer to accept.

Two of the seniors in Computer Science have accepted admission into the graduate program at ISU—one into the Ph.D program in Computer Science and one into the master’s program in HCI.

The mean starting salary of the five Software Engineering seniors was $59,200.  The high salary was $81,000. The Low was $50,000  Three of the five accepted positions with companies based in Iowa.

The mean starting salary of the 18 seniors in Computer Science graduating Spring/Summer’11 was $63,200 with high salary of $104,000 (for a senior who had been working full-time in IT for ten years with an AA degree) and a low of $45,000.  If the salary of the high was eliminated (and it is for a position here in Iowa), the mean was $59,800 with a high of $82,000 and a low of $45,000  Five of the 18 accepted offers with companies based in Iowa.

For the three Software Engineering seniors who accepted positions in Iowa, the mean salary was $50,600 with a low of $50K and a highs of $52k.

For the Computer Science seniors accepting a position in Iowa, the mean salary (eliminating the $104K because of the extensive prior work experience) of the four accepting positions in Iowa was $50,750 with a low of $45k and a high of $59,500.Congratulations to our graduating seniors!!!

Never underestimate the power of documentation.

I just spent five hours troubleshooting some tests for my CS417 testing project. We’re testing a 6 year old poker game that was probably developed as a senior design project. The documentation on their project is incomplete on many areas. Since I couldn’t find a place where they said how cards or stored or coded and I couldn’t easily see how they were assigning values, I guessed. My assumption was that when storing cards as integers, you would sort the cards by suit. The first 13 elements would be one suit, the next another.

Long story short, I was wrong. Their method was to sort by value: the first 4 elements were the 2’s, the next four were the 3’s, etc. And an entire day later, I now have a ton of hand generators that are outputting arrays of integers that didn’t match up with what their code expects.

For the sake of the sanity of all those who come after you, please document your projects thoroughly.

Update: I accepted a Web Applications Engineering co-op with Fisher Controls in Marshalltown from May through December.

The career fair was two weeks ago and I’m still waiting to find out where I’ll be this summer. This post outlines my approach to my search and how stuff went.

Here’s the resume I took to the career fair: Adam Reineke’s Spring 2011 resume [PDF]. I tried to create a hybrid resume that contained elements of a traditional resume enhanced with a writing style that would be more commonly found in a cover letter. My goal was to take the three areas that recruiter are most concerned with — education, experience, and extra-curricular involvement — and highlight those. I’ve heard these three described as a three-legged stool. You need all three, and if one is lacking, it can hurt your opportunities.

My cumulative GPA is 2.58, which is low enough that it blocks me from getting pre-selected for most interviews and even keeps some companies from taking my resume (namely a large medical company). The magic GPA number is 3.0. Below that, you struggle. Above that, you’re fairly set. The career fair offers a great opportunity to talk to recruiters who have to talk to you before throwing you out. I took advantage of this by highlighting my core GPA, a 3.18, which shows that I am competent in my focus area. Some companies, especially those with hard cutoffs, are familiar with this tactic and ask for the cumulative instantly, ending the conversation quite quickly. Other companies didn’t even ask.

So how’d it go?

Before the career fair, I applied for four interviews and was approved for two. I had also posted my resume on Twitter and landed an interview from that. At the career fair, I talked to around fifteen companies. (I had printed 30 resumes and I currently have 11 left after giving some out at interviews and giving one or two to friends). One scheduled an interview right on the spot, everyone else got back to me later. Over the next week, updates started coming in. I interviewed with, in alphabetical order:

• AEGON (in person)
• Blue Compass (on-site)
• Emerson/Fisher (in person, phone)
• Garmin (phone)
• Microsoft (in person)
• Pearson (in person)
• Rockwell Collins (in person)
• Thinix (in person, phone)

Responses, in no particular order (but not alphabetical):

• No, you’re overqualified and would be bored, but when you graduate, please apply for a full-time position.
• No, my GPA is too low, but I’m a strong candidate and was told to stay in touch with the recruiter so when my GPA improves I can schedule an interview.
• Currently scheduling an on-site interview.
• Waiting to hear back.
• Waiting to hear back.
• Waiting to hear back.
• Waiting to hear back.
• Waiting to schedule.

Of all those interviews, I only had two that asked any technical questions. One asked if I used tables or CSS to lay out web pages, so I pulled up some pages I had worked on and showed off my code. I think that stopped them from asking more questions. The other asked the process I would go through to develop a website, mostly discussing the gathering requirements and design phase. All the other interviews were behavioral questions and questions about work I had done previously.

I’ll think on the behavioral questions I was asked and let you know some of those in a future post. One of them was really tough. I gave a joke answer for another and made one my interviewers laugh pretty hard. Check back soon!

Well, I’ve dropped Calc 2 for this semester (soon as I get my professor to sign the drop slip). 18 credits was too much to handle and Calc seemed like the best thing to put off.

That means I’ll need to stick around Ames this summer and finish Calc 2 (May 17-July 9), so my summer break will run from July 9 until August 23rd (or 44 days without class). That’s still plenty of time to have fun.

The following is actually a re-post of a note I wrote on Facebook in August 2009. Now that I have a real blog, I thought I’d re-post it here.

This morning’s message at the Ames E-Free church was about laziness. Pastor David Staff has been preaching a series of messages out of Proverbs, and this one came at a great time for me.

First though, notes from the sermon are available. Scroll to the bottom and search for “Proverbs about WORK – A Call to Diligence” and click the icon that looks like a sheet of paper. In the zip file that downloads, the file name that starts “Got Wisdom #8…” is probably the note sheet you’d want to read (either PDF or Word format, they’re identical). That page also has an MP3 as well as video of the sermon.

In the notes, it lists how Proverbs describes a sluggard:

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I’m a part of the Dean’s Student Leadership Council, a group that meets with Dean Whiteford about every other week to learn more about the college administration and the issues faced by the university, as well as offer feedback and a way for the dean and his staff to interact with a varied group of students on a personal level.

Over break, the group was assigned to answer the following questions regarding ISU and the tuition we pay:

• What is my education worth?
• Where do I think ISU’s tuition should be?
• What kind of strategies should the college use to convey to students that we are a valuable entity?
• What are the three most important things I am getting from Iowa State?

Although I hadn’t initially written my response with the intention of sharing it, I think that someone may find it of interest, so I thought I’d post my thoughts…

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