Or, in other words . . . Does College Name Matter?
I have a young friend who is a rising high school senior. He wants to major in computer science, and his goal, after he graduates from college, is to return to the San Francisco Bay Area (where he grew up). He’s aiming for a job in Silicon Valley.
The problem? Even though he has the stat’s to likely be admitted to one or more well known and prestigious universities, he really wants to stay close to home and attend his local, “no name” state university. It has an adequate CS dept., but there’s no chance its career services office is ever going to be hosting any recruiters from Silicon Valley. So how difficult would it be for him to get noticed, and eventually hired, by a Silicon Valley tech company?
I have no idea how Silicon Valley recruiting works. Do the hiring managers spend 90% of their time looking at applications from the top 20 schools, and just 10% of their time on the thousands of others?
Would any of the following make a difference?
**- work experience/b - research during college
**- community service during college/b
**- student government/b
Is there anything else he can do to boost his chances? He qualifies for admission to the State U honors college, so he’ll be a “big fish in a small pond.” But it’s still a small pond that’s not on anyone’s radar.
If he has to apply outside his state, to better known schools, he will, but he’d really rather just submit his app to the state college and be done with it.
So, that’s the question: How much of a difference does it make to attend one of the “big name” CS schools?
Yes, if he can get an internship after high school and/or during the summer after his sophomore or junior year of college that will help. Also, he should work independently on programming projects–almost like building a ‘portfolio’ of programs he has written that do interesting and ideally useful things. By his junior year of college he should establish a LinkedIn profile that lists his CS credentials and CS interests. Many recruiters (including Google) watch LinkedIn and if they see a candidate that looks interesting will not hesitate to call/him or her for a preliminary interview.
I meant to add that if he does the above, he’ll have a good shot at employment, as much as a degree from a “big name” CS school can offer. Recruiters are most interested in the candidate’s ability to solve problems and write code.
Is he a Jr? It seems very low chance of local companies not hiring from local CSUs. They certainly do from SJSU. Is it East Bay? I am not really understanding his choices as far as why it has to be local no name vs big name when there are plenty of big enough names instate? Davis and Santa Cruz are near enough as well. And there is SCU. I just have to wonder why he doesn’t want a great education if it is within his reach.
While there are really good job opportunities now, though that can change, and the bigger companies likely hire from a very wide variety of colleges, much more than the top 20 CS, there are certainly advantages of a top tier school name (again this is a pretty good number of colleges imo) when you first get out of school there is some richness in placement and salary in some entry CS positions.
Internships help a lot, if you are starting to learn some of the job specific skills and working with nuts and bolts programming. Research is always good. And having a github account and showing what you can do would be valuable. If you are really fantastically skilled and experienced that kinda trumps everything but that may be outliers. Does he already have mad skills? I don’t think he community service and student govt will have much significance but you never know what piques someone’s interest.
I think something he could do as an eye opener would be to look at a few startups and other firms that list the people and see where they are coming from. Here is a good one where you can just rollover the faces to see the bio–the people page for Asana, a startup founded by Dustin Moskovitz (FB co-founder, billionaire) There are some CSUs in there in marketing but I didn’t come across any in software and engineering. It is Stanford, Michigan, MIT, UT Austin, UCLA, Brown, Cornell, CMU, Cal Tech, Waterloo etc and there is a few different or ones like U of Montana, some overseas.
Except for a couple of highly selective LOCAL universities, the name of the school will matter little to none for CS jobs in the Bay Area. It is all about verifiable technical skills. Check the tools that are in high demand in 2015 and go from there in building a portfolio. Check was “coding” factories teach nowadays.
To clarify, @BrownParent, he is not in California, although his family lived there when he was younger. He’s not near any other hubs for CS activity either. The CS internship that he’s been tentatively promised is with a local company - I don’t know the name, but I got the impression it’s not anyone well known. So it likely won’t be “cutting edge,” but it’ll be experience.
And, no, he does not have “mad skills,” just a few classes in high school that he really enjoyed. We’ve no way of knowing what he can accomplish in college, although I expect he’ll be a strong student. Given that background, perhaps he needs the boost of a more competitive college?
@Pootie - I appreciate the suggestion that he create a LinkedIn profile. I hadn’t realized that prospective employers would recruit that way!
Probably one of the biggest advantages to being local is simply being able to find out what employers there are to apply to. Also, if one is at a local school with a significant number of CS majors, many smaller companies will recruit there out of convenience.
Anyway, out of the things you listed, their importance in likelihood of attracting an interview is typically in the order you list them, assuming relevance to CS and the particular job being sought. Interviews will generally include technical questions.
The bigger name distant schools may attract some recruiting among companies who can afford to travel to recruit. I.e. some of them may travel to Michigan because they have heard of it, but may not even know that Michigan Tech exists, for example.
Again, this is a kid who wouldn’t be attending ANY of the so-called “pipeline” schools. The question is how much this will disadvantage him, if at all, and what he’d need to do to compensate.
From what I saw of D1’s job search: the things on her resume that got noticed were the list of courses she’d taken, her summer internships, and the (coding) projects she’d done for those courses and internships. Her initial resume included a lot of interesting non-technical things–those all got ruthlessly stripped out by her advisors. Based on that, I’d say that things like community service and student government are not gonna add to the strength of your young friend’s resume.
She got interviews for a range of firms (start-ups through big names) both through the CS department at her school and by submitting her resume to places that had posted online they were looking to hire. Some firms reached out to her based on her LinkedIn profile (this started at the end of her sophomore year, and she was by no means some sort of coding superstar). She did not attend a name brand CS school. Her fallback plan was to attend a Bay Area job fair, because there are so many openings. Things could be different in five years, of course, but it’s hard to believe that the market will saturate.
Suggest that your young friend ask the CS department at the local school where their students are getting summer internships, and what kind of job offers they’re getting after graduation. Compare course catalogs and major requirements–will he be able to take as many different courses in the major at Local School as at other colleges? Talk to professors and find out what kind of assistance they’re able to offer students who want internship oppportunities–the department’s careers networking is going to be more crucial than the college-wide career services. It sounds like the student wants to stick close to home during college years; if there aren’t opportunities for him to increase his skillset by working for outside firms, he’ll have to be self-disciplined enough to develop a portfolio of work that would demonstrate his competence, such as app development.
Agree that experience (internships, participation in programs like EWB (Engineers without Borders) and demonstrated competence in a skill is important. Those then become the right buzzwords on his resume which he can post on linked in. A lot of recruiters do scan (electronically) people on linked in.
He may have to gain experience with another employer before he gets his foot in the door with a SV company. He has to develop his skills. That said, if he is from SV, contacts help a lot to get resumes into the right hands or a personal reference made for an initial contact. My s’s went to good schools but not necessarily “feeder” schools, and started their employment elsewhere before making their way to SV.
**** ETA- Older s’s first job in SV was with a customer of the company he was working for at the time. The customer lured him away from the previous employer.
@dodgermom I was just showing that you don’t need Stanford in order to get a great job. His journey may be a little longer, but he can start small, get a job, work hard, and build a resume to eventually get a job in Silicon Valley.