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For the past three months I have been applying and interviewing for co-ops as part of my IT major at RIT. I finally received a job offer earlier this week and accepted it. Sounds great, right? So what's the problem? To answer this I'll be discussing what brought me to RIT in the first place as well as my "ultimate goal" for being there. (See the last bolded section for the actual questions)
Background
The initial reason I decided to return to school and chose RIT has to do with my previous experience working in IT in a help desk role for their internal customers (my co-workers). Back in 2008 through a local staffing agency I worked in the IT department of a security software/hardware company on a 6-month contract with the possibility of hiring as full-time afterwards. I was qualified for the position based on my A+ Certification as well as my passion for troubleshooting computers and improving their efficiency. However, 5 months into my contract is when the economy took a nose dive for the worst (see the documentary Inside Job for a better understanding of what happened). As my contract was coming to a close, the decision to hire or let me go came up. Unfortunately, I was laid off (as well as nearly 1/3 of the IT department) due primarily to me having the least amount of relative experience there.
I learned a lot during my stay there from my network and system administrators, contributed on multiple projects, initiated many solutions and improvements, and frequently interacted with other departments. I was happy with where I was going in my life and thought they only would improve. During my two weeks there (after I heard I was going to be laid off), I still worked hard. On my final day there I walked around to everyone I frequently interacted with just to shake their hands and tell them I truly enjoyed working with them. Many of my co-workers were shocked that I was being laid off. Four of them from different departments wrote me professional references to help me out as I had to return to the "unpaid full-time" job search.
After two months of researching, applying, interviewing, attending career workshops, and asking my friends and family about openings in IT, I came up empty. I started to consider either joining the Air Force or to earn a bachelors degree in IT from a good college (I previously only had an Associate's Degree in Liberal Arts). After discussions with my family as well as some other TL members (see some of my beginning blog posts), I decided on returning to school.
I initially started as an ANSA (Applied Networking and System Administration) major at RIT. However, as I was taking some of my required core classes in programming and web development, I "found my calling". Problem solving has always been a huge interest of mine. It stimulates my mind and I love the satisfaction from completing challenging tasks. In fact, it plays a huge role in my love for Starcraft. On the other hand, as I was taking more advanced classes in networking and switching, I realized I had no passion for the network side. After speaking with my academic advisor, I switched to majoring in IT where I then concentrate on two IT-related fields. I'm thinking it'll be Programming and Web Development, but could end up with Programming and Databasing, or Programming and System Administration.
Where I am now
As part of my major, I need to complete three quarters worth of co-ops in an IT related field. I was hoping to get a job offer for entry level software, web development, or quality assurance. However, despite me feeling confident at the end of the interviews I routinely received the "Many people applied for the position [...] a more qualified candidate [...] has been chosen [...]" when it came to the final decision on the job. But what about the job offer I received?
Finally getting to My Questions
The job offer I received was working in a help desk role. It had the lowest pay ($11.50/hr), was the least challenging (I've done help desk before), and overall my least favorite of my options. However, after three months of searching for co-ops and this being my only job offer, I accepted it. I still have one last week left in this quarter (finals week) and it will be a few weeks until all the paperwork is done before I start the position.
The "ultimate goal" of mine while at RIT is to have the education, skills, and contacts I gain help me out with my ideal career. I do not know exactly what my ideal career will be, but I am leaning towards programming or web development. To say the least, working in help desk (again) is not making much progress towards that goal.
1) While I work help desk in this co-op, should I continue interviewing for roles I am more interested in? How should I go about this? Wait until the last few months of my current co-op first? Continue interviewing from the start?
2) If I interview with other companies, what should I mention as my starting date? Is it unethical for me to break ties with an employer who just extended me a job offer? One reason I am concerned about this is the employer is Monroe County, not just a local business. Working for Monroe County (the county I live in) could help me out with finding more positions in the future.
3) For those currently working in software or web development, how did you get the jobs? Any advice? On a rough scale of 1-5 (beginner to expert), my skill ratings:
* Java/C++/OOP: 3 (previous courses, a few small personal projects, and one medium-sized project)
* CSS/HTML: 3 (previous courses and a few small personal projects)
* PHP: 1 (learning through online tutorials at the moment)
* Flash/AS3: 2 (just took a class in Interactive Digital Media this quarter)
* MySQL: 3 (previous courses)
I feel my problem is I do not truly excel in any of them. I feel overwhelmed looking at the skills required in job descriptions. Ideally, I would like to find another job where I can have the opportunity to quickly ramp up my skills (I am a very quick learner and am extremely motivated on the job). That's why I've been concentrating on learning the fundamentals of many different languages before delving into the deep end. Bad approach? Advice?
4) I believe a big reason I struggle so much with the job search process is my lack of effective networking skills. Though I have a few contacts, I do not know what to ask them to be able to help me out without coming off poorly. And though I have a LinkedIn account, I have no idea how to make good use out of it. Any suggestions for being able to improve my network of contacts? How can I get started?
Thanks for your time reading this. Feel free to ask me anything.
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Hyrule18934 Posts
Continue searching. Don't take too many days off for interviews though. When you do go to interviews, let the person/people know that you're in a Co-op at the moment, but you're looking for a job for after co-op/graduation, etc.
As for how I found my job...monster.com! If you put up your resume there I guarantee many dozens of hiring agencies will call you (personally none of them have worked for me yet, the place I work at called me directly) and try to get you a job.
A good way to beef up your resume is to just start doing random shit off rentacoder.com or one of those sites. That way, when the interviewer says "so what have you done?" you can say "X.com, Y.com, and Z.com are my recent favorites, but I've also done A, B, C, D and E."
Networking is important. I didn't have any luck with it, but eh? The economy is in the shit. Any help you can get you should take. If you know someone who knows someone, ask for a recommendation.
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I will write from my experience as a job seeker. Btw i don't know what a co-op is but it doesn't really matters with what I want to say.
1) If you find that you job isn't really suiting you and you could do better, of course you should find another job. For me it's perfectly fine to accept a job just to buy food and searching something else. One thing is it can be really hard to search a job and working at the same time. You will not have a lot of spare time to schedule interviews and you'll will want to do something else than search for job offers when you go back home. But if you have a strong will you can do it.
2)I don't think you'll need a lot of time between your interview and starting. I mean not to dumb you down but you're working in a help desk for $11.50/hr it's not like you're the CEO of the company or whatever. You're kind of expendable, and you will be for sometime if you want to work in programming ^^
Usually you want time to make the transition with the guy that will replace you, judge it by yourself according to what you're doing.
3) Don't oversell yourself unless you work on some pretty deep stuff in the field of your future employee you expertise in any language is 0 on a scale of 1 to 5 (yeah 0) but like everyone else :p
Like if you're going to work for the insurance company. Ok you can code in java but do you know anything about the functional needs of such a company, usually the answer is no, that was my case.
If you know something about J2EE or EJB or spring or struts, you can mention it but it's really important to show that you can learn easily about the fields they are working in not only technical stuff. Learning quickly is way more important that's the small experience you have in any programming language.
I think it's pretty important when you go to the interview to know a lot about what the company is doing try to find what can they want from their IT department, what are they really doing, like for insurance company how to they deal with clients through IT ? What kind of applications they use?How do they work internally ? For me it's more valuable than I know how to code a SHA256 algorithm in Java (which is really pointless, trus me I did it :p).
4) Edit: Oh shit I thought you were talking about networks. A can't really help anyway I think it's pretty different in France.
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Not being all that familiar with how things work in the US or what the course you are on teaches I'll just give some general advice. I'm going to guess a "co-op" is like work experience?
Finish your course then apply for as many jobs as possible. While you are applying for jobs you should seriously consider doing some freelance web development work. It will pay decently and it looks fantastic to potential employers. It shows two things. A) You are motivated B) You are useful.
Having said that - If you manage to get a good job offer or meet someone looking to hire web developers before your course is finished then GO FOR IT. Real experience > bit of paper.
As for LinkedIn... I don't use it. Some people I work with have accounts but never use or update them. I don't think it's as big a deal as people make it out to be. This could be different in the US though.
Anyway, I'll try to give you an idea of how I got started as a developer.
I started working as a Junior Developer straight out of Tafe. I'm not really sure the US equivalent is but it was basically a technical school that taught you how be useful in a job environment instead of ending up with a degree and no experience.
When I was a Junior Developer I had decent pay (not great) and was basically expected to learn new things as I came across them. You have to be very interested in what you are doing and be able to pick things up fast.
After about 2 years of that I was just thrown in the deep end to see how I went. I was sent to customers to deal with problems and asked on a few occasions to go through external code, find issues and fix them. I was also really good at coming up with rough solutions for problems.
An example? A certain bank (won't name them) was having problems with scanned documents taking forever to upload. The only requirements were that we can't create a "desktop" application to deal with the issue. My solution was to just make a simple JavaWS application that handled file uploading instead of the basic web form. It would take the TGA images and convert them to PNG then upload them to the server.
Sounds simple right? It is. But no one else even considered something as simple as that.
What I learned from that is even if you have what seems like an idea that is too simple or dumb just tell people anyway. Even if it's no good it might spark someone elses imagination into getting a workable solution (which you can then take partial credit for!)
If your idea gets shot down as being unworkable by someone more knowledgable take that as a valuable lesson. Just make sure they explain exactly why it won't work so you learn from them (most good developers looooove explaining because it lets them show how clever they are).
What you need to prove to a good employer is that:
- You don't know everything but you absolutely love to learn new things. You NEED to be able to teach yourself how to do things to be successful in IT.
- You have ideas and you aren't afraid to share them.
What people aren't looking for is another dud out of university that memorised everything successfully but can't think for themselves.
Now, to me, you seem like you at least have the right attitude towards learning. I only knew the "basics" to things like PHP, Java, XHTML, CSS, JS when I started. If I look back at Java code I wrote in Tafe it makes me laugh but it also makes me proud of how much I've improved. Now I can safely say I am one of the best at CSS, JS and PHP in the company I work for. People ask me questions now, not the other way around 
Having the right attitude is huge. I honestly think I got the job just because they could tell I was a massive nerd and I loved programming/computers - still do!
Hopefully my rambling manages to help you a little. I'll admit I was worried about not finding a job once my course had finished. Fortunately there is still a huge demand for good developers - I had no issue finding a great job that suited my skill set.
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A co-op is a full-time paid internship. You work for 10, 20, or 30 weeks (the equivalent of 1, 2, or 3 quarters at RIT) and your supervisor submits performance reviews to your school.
It's tough to talk about networking here without people thinking I'm talking about routers and switches  see my recent thread in the General Forum. I decided to refer to it as "Career Progression Networking" to differentiate it.
Franz,
I agree, being in Help Desk certainly is an expendable role. As mentioned in that huge blob-o-text, I certainly do not want to stay in Help Desk the rest of my life. From what I've heard from other professionals, most businesses consider Help Desk as "overhead" costs - i.e. they want to minimize them whenever possible. I was hoping programming or web development would not be seen as much as an "overhead cost", since I would then be more directly related to improving the company's products. Thanks for your input! I'm curious what your current role is, how long you've been there, and whether or not you fear you may be "expendable"?
Tofucake,
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll try rentacoder.com and update my Monster.com resume (I haven't been there in years since I didn't get the feeling it was doing me much good). Similar to what I said to Franz, I'm curious about your current position. Could you tell me a little more about it? What you do, how long you've been there, etc?
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I work as a J2EE developper for a ECM integrator for 1 year and half, and I'm currently working in a insurance company on an intranet web application since 6 month ago.
I do not fear to be "expendable" what I mean is that my job is not overly complicated for a java developper. Any java developper could do it hence I am expendable because I am not a key employee I don't have any secret knowledge that makes me unexpendable ^^
Unless you're an expert in some area that is really necessary to your company you can be replace kind of easily even if you're good at what you do. Your replacement can be worth than you but there is a good chance the job will get done, so you have less pressure to quit whenever you want but you won't have a good leverage on your hierarchy to negotiate anything.
That's what I meant by expendable, you're expendable so you're free to leave whenever you want.
Edit: I'll write a bit more to support my theory about the "you don't know shit when you graduate".My last year of school I work in a lab doing AI with genetic algorithm and other stuff (RANSAC if you're interested).
I then looked for a job near my hometown (Lyon in France, it's pretty big for France, like 1 millions people including the suburbs) but we have some kind of a particular system for IT jobs in France. A lot of people work in what we call SSII, it's a company that rent IT engineer to other companies so that they don't need to hire them.
I found a company through my college friend who was working in ECM (enterprise content manager) I didn't know shit about it and I was vaguely familiar with Java, but pretty ok in OOP and c# so I know how to code in java. I got a job there and learnt more about that field in 1 year than could ever learn in college. IT is to wide to learn anything other than basics in college and that's okay because except 1% of people everybody is a rookie when you leave college.
That's why you shouldn't try to sell yourself on your knowledge but more on what you can become for the company.
Except for web site development. Web site development is the same everywhere so if you have experience in that it's good everywhere. Otherwise it's pretty hard to have a good experience when you just got out of school.
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On May 13 2011 23:18 vek wrote:
What you need to prove to a good employer is that:
- You don't know everything but you absolutely love to learn new things. You NEED to be able to teach yourself how to do things to be successful in IT.
- You have ideas and you aren't afraid to share them.
What people aren't looking for is another dud out of university that memorised everything successfully but can't think for themselves.
Thanks for all your input Vek! I really liked reading about your start in the field. I hope to get there soon as well.
I always make a point in my interviews to emphasize my ability to quickly learn new things. I also mention things like taking initiative and my self-motivation, but do not go in much depth on them. I'll keep in mind I should emphasize them a bit more in future interviews.
During an interview, I once was asked why I should be hired for the position, given my GPA is "only" 3.5, compared to others with near 4.0 GPAs. I responded saying the GPA is a reflection of the courses taken and course work, and not a reflection of how valuable I will be in contributing to the company. I feel a bit disillusioned with academia since I am getting into so much debt from student loans at an expensive university, and do not feel like many of the classes I take will help me out with my careers. When I'm on the job, I am extremely passionate about the work I do. I constantly look for what can be improved and without guidance, try to find solutions. (I also of course help out with problems my team wants us to work on.). I just don't feel that passionate with my school work.
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