These students are recent Hope computer science graduates who are currently engaging in a wide variety of industry careers across the country. They have graciously agreed to correspond with current Hope students about any career questions you might have.
- Emily (Walhstrom)
Rutgers ('00): Currently employed by Holland
Public Schools
Emily is a computer technician for the Holland school district. She states "I go to all the elementaries, secondaries and administration buildings to fix their computers (hardware and software), install software and answer questions. Some weeks, I run the help desk where staff can call in for some instant assistance. I've also planned the movement of large amounts of computers and set up new machines as they come in."
Skills important in Emily's job are advanced knowledge of Macintosh and Windows hardware and software, interpersonal skills, patience, organization, and self motivation.
- Anita Bateman ('98):
Currently employed by IBM
Anita works as an IT architect for the Software division of IBM. She determines the architecture of overall solutions that market IBM products to other companies, especially to business partners. Herb job includes designing new architectures, understanding customer requirements and how they fit into our existing applications and working with my architect team members to come up with new ideas to help our customers work better, faster, with more flexibility and productivity. She also provide technical guidance and reviews for our development teams as they implement new requirements for our business partner customers and IBM internal customers.
Anita states that important job skills for her job include both deep and broad technical knowledge of various technologies (J2EE, Object-Oriented, IBM technologies available, web services, Struts, DB2, etc.), communication, writing skills, organization and presentation skills, leadership, ability to work independently and make decisions, teamwork, ability to work with multi-national teams, etc.
- Mike Thelen ('98): Currently employed by Attensity
Corporation
Mike is a software developer for Attensity Corporation, a software company in Salt Lake City, Utah. He helps to create natural language processing software that can read and analyze English text 20,000 times faster than a human. The software is used by corporations and government agencies to process textual information that would otherwise be very time-consuming to analyze. He enjoys putting his skills to use on such a difficult and rewarding task. He was also among the first software developers at Attensity, and was recently recognized with a Founders Circle award for his contributions to the continuing success of the company.
Mike says the most important skill in his work is a willingness to learn and to adapt to a changing environment. He's currently writing user interface code using C++ and Qt, but tomorrow may be munging data files with Perl or extending our core parsing technology with C++. It is also important to be able to recognize trade-offs and decide which factors may be most important. For example, you may be able to write really efficient code that is completely unmaintainable, or vice versa. Another necessary skill is the ability to communicate, both verbally and in writing. Programming is not just writing code. It also involves lots of communication with fellow programmers, supervisors, trainees, and sometimes even customers. Good communication skills are definitely necessary for success.