Parents of the HS Class of 2023 (Part 1)

They are hiring new grads from USC (So Cal) as well. A friend was hired at Google upon graduation from SLO.

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Wow, they ask for GPA on a resume?? I have never ever put my GPA on a resume.

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Well, I am in CS :grinning: and we do a lot of tech hiring, so


Yes the college does matter to us for our high skilled software jobs (i.e. stuff that needs a CS degree, not stuff you could write after taking a coding boot camp). But aside from the elite privates known for CS, the colleges that stand out to us include a lot of top public CS schools (UCLA, UCB, Mich, UIUC, Purdue, UMD, GT, etc) as well as local schools that are lower ranked by national magazines but have provided strong talent (Stevens and Rutgers for example). Harvard and Yale on the other hand aren’t high on our priority list.

But a couple of other things that I think are worth mentioning:

  • the school name only matters for a fresh-out-of-college job. For other experienced roles we don’t care at all.
  • there are plenty of tech jobs that don’t require a high level of knowledge/robust and deep foundation, and you can get these jobs from pretty much any school.

Yes, it’s fairly standard when applying to tech jobs. We (and many other firms) also ask for GPA across core CS courses.

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You know, I wouldn’t have even broached the subject, at all, but not for what I read on CC. :grinning:

I was orignally asking them about layoffs at Meta. They had to lay off 4 team members on a 20-person team recently and I was asking if those laid off workers had found jobs.

Anyways, I jokingly asked them if they saw two equal CS candidates, one with a degree from Harvard, one from Alabama, would they choose the Ivy League degree’d person. They said yes. Ivy League CS mattered to them, and not just Cornell CS.

Again, I only know what I read here on CC. :man_facepalming: :rofl:

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I think it depends which two schools you’re comparing.
if you had asked them to pick between Harvard and UMich, their answer might have been different :grinning:

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My husband is a mechanical engineer in the Silicon Valley. He has a degree from Oregon State an has been working in his field for close to 30 years. He is in a position where he interviews an hires a lot of newly graduated engineers. His take is that a school’s name might help you get your first interview, but beyond that, what is far more important is what you know. Beyond that first job, nobody asks where you went to school. What they care about is whether you can demonstrate skills, work with people, and communicate knowledge. I’m not an engineer myself, but I’m married to one and we’re steering 23 (would be robotics engineer) to focus on fit and $ above prestige.

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UC app went out yesterday. One more app due this week
and on to the final flurry of regular season RD apps. The good thing is I think he’s found his stride in writing essays
he’s doing a much better job of addressing the prompts and crafting effective sentences and paragraphs.

Ironically, he got hurt in the finals of his Hoops finals so he can’t practice or play with his club team (they were in the playoffs of a national competition). That’s really helped clear up some much needed time on his schedule.

I will be so glad when this phase of applications are done.

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3 acceptances so far. Tonight will be a long night of ensuring he is meeting his Dec 1st due dates. He has everything done, just has to upload (and yes, I know about how things can slow and crash but its too late to make him do it earlier).

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My son was accepted at Duquesne. We both liked the campus when we visited over the summer. Do you know anything about it since you live there? My only concern would be the weather but my son says he doesn’t care about the cold (we live in Baltimore). Thanks!

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I went to Duquesne for law school and actually got married in the chapel. I have niece who is a freshman and is happy there.

As you know from visiting Duquesne is a well defined campus but walking distance to downtown and about 2 miles from Pitt and CMU.

For some majors Duquesne is a very good school. It just depends.

The weather between Baltimore and pittsburgh not really that different

ohh – just deleted my brain fog question

My company still asks for SAT or ACT scores, even for applicants decades out of college. They also ask for GPA’s and will require college transcripts for anyone before they are hired.

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Worth noting: Not everyone in tech wants a job with FAANG.

Example: My daughter who’s currently majoring in industrial engineering, for example. She wants a reasonable workweek and a reasonable cost of living, and neither of those are going to come from working at FAANG.

So it’s worth remembering that those who head to those companies, including those who end up in hiring, are (a) a pretty small slice of those in tech and (b) a rather self-selected and thus unrepresentative group.

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I thought Facebook and Netflix had been dropped due to poor performance and the current east coast media acronym is MAGA (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon), which was presumably designed to stoke hostility to tech companies.

Having grown up in the UK it is expected that you’ll put your degree class (1, 2:1, 2:2, 3) on your resume for your entire career. With grade inflation (and in many cases 90% now getting a first or 2:1), it’s not uncommon for some companies to only hire early career candidates with a first. The UK still likes to conduct numeracy tests (they aren’t illegal there) for candidates even at the most senior levels (my SIL was asked to do one when applying for a job as CEO!).

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Up late doing music school application uploads. When out of the blue he says “if music and other stuff doesn’t work out, I want to look into being a therapist.” Wth kid. This was not on the radar. Now going back and hoping many of his schools have psych options.

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From the class of 2024 but wanted to chime in on this as I am in an engineer and my spouse is an engineer and we both have worked in the tech industry over 20+ years and yes for fresh graduates (bachelors or Masters) and may be even up to 2 years after college we do look at the GPA and also the college they went to. If someone applies from a college I have never heard of I do google the college and see how the student profile of kids who attend there compares to other colleges well known colleges. This includes the GPA Range and SAT range in high school.
You don’t need an Ivy but a good engineering college is better. Example Cal poly SLo is not nationally ranked but well known for engineering.

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College prestige for engineers: As with everything, it depends, doesn’t it? For example, engineering firms here in Alaska certainly hire quite heavily from the University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, even though those don’t land on anybody’s high-prestigiosity lists here on CC, ever. Similarly, I would have to imagine that engineering firms in, say, South Dakota (including local offices of national companies) hire pretty heavily from South Dakota State. And so on—there are advantages, both in terms of knowing that your employees are more likely to stick around and for building local goodwill, for firms to hire from local colleges, after all.

One more in (at least mostly): With much cajoling from her older sister, D23 finished her essay for Middle Tennessee’s full-tuition scholarship today
and then every attempt to upload it kept giving an error (in multiple browsers). Fortunately there was an email address for support, but of course it was after business (well, even waking) hours in the Central time zone by then, so hopefully it’ll all get figured out tomorrow morning.

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But you will be surprised the name of the colleges they are most interested in. There is actually a study out there, that showed companies who hire engineers will pick an applicant from a state school over an Ivy. There is a perception of the type of person you get. I read somewhere a CS hiring manager in Texas, preferred to hire applicants out of UT Dallas over Austin, because of the perception of the “type” of person. Yes, companies will chose applicants from one college over another but the reasons why are necessarily the perceived “Prestige”. I have found over the year, locals like to hire locals.

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My 2 cents as a now non-practicing engineer.

  1. Regardless of your ultimate career choice an engineering undergraduate degree is greatly valuable. Engineers, math and philosophy majors tend to be better thinkers/problem solvers than pure business majors.

  2. Rankings matter little, it’s more important that you are looking at accredited programs

  3. Consider programs that are more undergraduate focused, are base classes actually taught by faculty? or are you attending big lectures and then recitations taught by a grad student.

  4. Consider matching up teaching styles with learning styles. Look at schools like WPI that are more hands on project based. Schools like Drexel that have a co-op program


  5. Consider what you want to do after graduation. You are interested in construction management on large scale projects think about Manhattan College. Interested in renewable energy think about Colorado school of mines. Look at the types of companies and jobs that students intern at. Ask for a list of job placements after graduation.

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