From what I have experienced, the most difficult part of finding a job coming from ND was getting my foot in the door while trying to overcome a bout of impostor’s syndrome. I was trying desperately to get an internship for the summer after my sophomore year during the fall of my sophomore year, with half a semester of C under my belt and a measly MATLAB side project I had been working on over the summer. And although I knew our curriculum was behind Cornell’s because of the First Year of Studies, I couldn’t help but compare myself to my sister who had gotten an internship with Google after her sophomore year. I knew that I knew almost nothing about the world of computing and had just started on one of the most basic languages there is, and was stacked against a bunch of juniors who had started in high school or at least during their freshman year of college and  already knew at least 2 or 3 languages. When I finally got one interview, I was scared out of my mind and started preparing right away for the upcoming interview, crash coursing myself on object oriented concepts that I had never heard of before, on Java because that’s what the company primarily used, and on the company culture and values in case I needed to impress them on that. It worked, and I got my foot in the door, which lead to a more prestigious junior summer internship and a post graduation job which I am pleased with. Luckily, I had my sister to guide me through the process, giving me tips, suggestions on what to study and how to talk through my solution and ask clarification questions during the interview, and even giving me mock questions during when she was home for Christmas, as the interview turned out to be in January. Our document does its best to include all of this advice throughout the main sections, and I was happy to know all of that interview advice as early as I did. For awhile I had a sort of guilt that I had been able to use such a great resource when I know so many of my classmates didn’t have that chance . The most important piece of advice my sister gave me, though, was incredibly simple, “Remember to stay calm and think through the problem because you’re smart.” That was all it took for me, a reminder to keep my head and rely on my perhaps technically under-qualified, but certainly logical and critical thinking, mind. And we include in what I believe to be our strongest portion of the document, the ramblings by experienced students, this piece of advice.

One thing I wish I had known earlier, given that I had so much information about the process so early on, is that having a sophomore year internship is useful, but certainly isn’t a deal breaker when it comes to junior year internships. Knowing this would have certainly softened the blow I would have felt if I had not received an offer that year, and it’s something that I would have liked to have been able to share with underclassmen sooner. I saw a lot of my friends who after sophomore year either didn’t have internships, or who had internships that weren’t very technical, getting placed at fantastic companies before the start of the school year.

Notre Dame, along with a number of other universities, is facing the reality that although we are educating our students primarily, most of the students here want that education to translate into a job offer upon graduation rather than getting a degree and going through the courses just for the sake of obtaining knowledge. I don’t think that this calls for a change in the curriculum though, at least not toward training for interviews and resumes. The ND CSE department is doing an excellent job of helping more sophomores place by taking steps to appropriately accelerate the curriculum to match the pace of other top CSE programs across the country, but this need not include training for interviews. The career centers at these schools are responsible for taking helping  those students at the university who want to translate their education into a marketable set of skills that they can use to achieve gainful employment. The rise of these technical interviews has not been matched by career centers, and the career centers should be working with the CSE departments not to change the curricula to include job training, but rather to help the career centers develop useful resources for students who require technical interviews while  the CSE department encourages students early and often in their academic careers to go to the career center for assistance in finding job openings and acing interviews.