So, last week I made my decision: I will be switching to a Masters degree program. This does mean that I won't get to do that internship at Lawrence Livermore, because the internship requires that you commit to staying in school through the Fall semester. This actually turns out to be okay because I will get to stay at school through August to finish up my thesis. There's a fair bit of work still left; I have to finish up all the remaining programming work, write documentation on all my code so that my replacement can figure out what's going on after I leave, and of course write the actual thesis. Also, I have started to look for full-time jobs for after school.
I went to the Engineering Career Services office and got my resume and cover letter looked at, and they basically had me rewrite the whole thing using the format described in the career guide, which made it look much better. I took the new resume and cover letter over to the Graduate College's career services office, and they told me that my resume and cover letter looked very good, and they only had a couple minor stylistic changes. I searched for jobs online and through job posting on bulletin boards in the Computer Science department. So far I have submitted resumes to 9 companies, and have gotten phone interview requests from 2 of them. One of them was MathWorks, which makes Matlab. Another was Palantir Technologies, which makes a data analysis and visualization platform (read the web site if you are interested). They wanted to interview me for a "Business Development" position, and I'm very interested in what that position entails. I'll report back when I see how the interviews go.
And one more thing. When I was in elementary school and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer "math test-question editor", because I took lots of math tests like the Math Olympiad during that time and often I found the test questions ambiguous. During my online job search, I found an online job advertisement for a math test-question editor. But things have changed a lot in the past 15 years, and I decided not to apply for that job.
1 comment:
Sounds like you are doing all the right things. Keep us posted.
And be sure to consult with your professors. You want to make sure you go into an area of computer science where there is growth so you can develop your career. Don't just think of it as a job, think of it as the first step in your career. But your professors can advise you better about that than me. Think about how that job could lead to either another job in the same company in a few years or a job some place else doing something related.
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