Liberty is doing a lot of its new tech stuff in Boston - check out Solaria Labs. Congrats!
Be sure she adds that Math Student Of The Year to her resume & LinkedIn profiles for her next job search. 
Congratulations! Seattle’s a cool city. Now she can really enjoy senior year.
Young is considered good (company) culture, but then people turn around and complain about age discrimination against older people…
Congrats!!!
@ucbalumnus For somebody just getting out of college a young culture is desirable. My daughter was choosing between two companies for her first post-graduate job and the fact that one had a young group of employees did factor into her decision.
This is especially important for young people relocating for their first job. They need to make new connections in a new location and having co-workers their age that they can socialize with helps.
I get the age discrimination stuff, being old myself, but I don’t think my husband or I are the co-workers my 20 something daughter wants to work with.
Best wishers to her. I hope she gets exposure to the ML/AI group. She should also consider perusing MS while working or investigating some of the online courses on the topic. Coursera offers many good ML/AI classes online.
It’s a pretty good economy out there right now, I’d say wait.
I think the OP and her daughter are doing a great job of wading through all the differing opinions in regards to this matter. Choices are difficult . I have a kid who has had a number of different internships at large tech companies and is now doing research in advanced machine learning. If you want to do machine learning you have to know how to code in python and R at a minimum and you should be able to do it well. You also should know Hadoop and Sql You need to know calculus, linear algebra, optimization , probability ,some theoretical statistics , data extraction, how to clean data and general linear models at a minimum. What I wonder is whether insurance companies do much ML / AI at all?
Seattle is a great area. I love it there. Maybe OPs daughter can take some classes at UW. They have some great programs there
I’d think that insurance companies would be be very interested in ML with all of the data they have access to. The only question is which ones will do in-house development versus buy.
Congratulations. Seattle is a great city.
Indeed, this may be an argument that she made the right decision to accept the insurance company job in Seattle. If she still wants to get out of the insurance industry after a year or so, it should not be difficult to look for other computing jobs in Seattle, relative to being in some other places like a small lesser known college in a small town in upstate New York. (Of course, there is always the possibility of an economic or industry downturn. But even if that occurs, location still matters in terms of convenience to the job seeker and potential employers trying to match each other.)
Can she take CS 322, the artificial intelligence course, before she graduates?
I was on a data science team in one of the big names in insurance. It is not where a young person should be - not for learning cutting edge tech or making a name for herself. Don’t settle.
I’ve been one of those on the “you’re in a seller’s market” camp. But I think she’s in a good place-- just don’t get too settled in. Spend a year or two and then if she’s not happy, go elsewhere. My kiddo started at about that salary, in a more expensive area, in a “dead end” job (but she was not a CS major-- long story). After 2.5 years she moved to a “name” with a 50% increase in salary.
Don’t settle! Keep her worth in mind, as well as her interests and desires.
(and IMHO Skidmore is not a “no name” school. Smart kids go there )
I would definitely wait. If she has won the math student of the year she can parlay that into a company she WANTS. if the company was just so-so and the industry was great, I’d say go and then change companies. But insurance is not exactly cutting edge. She will lose her first opportunity to build a career. The rotation thing doesn’t sound good to me. There is no specifics about what choices she’ll have. When you are young working for a great company cannot be underrated. I’m happy that she chose the insurance gig and is happy about it, but I’d advise my kiddos to jump into the fire a little. It’s much easier when you are young and don’t have the obligations of kids and a house and spouse. MATH student of the year, a strong academic record and being a female in STEM ( are you kidding me) she should be writing her own ticket. BTW, Seattle is a good town for her career, that job is the issue.
Congratulations to your D @NEPatsGirl - on the award and the job decision!
^^ that sounds very promising. And now she can go on and enjoy her final year.
Regarding the ML/AI interest, I will chime in that most employers are looking for PhD to do that kind of work. I work in IT in financial services, and they want a figurehead PhD to lead at least. Yes they may hire developers but the career path upwards requires PhD. One of my kids is working on a masters in “information science” and not sure if even that is sufficient. He did get an interview for an ML job but it was a PhD alumni of his university doing the recruiting and while they asked for PhD or Masters students, part of the application was to provide research samples. As a 1st year masters student he has no published research yet. They did see him but no offer nor 2nd interview.
Also note my other son, an undergrad in CS, got an internship where they list all the things you “may” work on. Of course they have ML/AI on the list, it sounds good to recruit kids, but he didn’t not encounter ANYONE working on ML during the summer. Maybe in some other office. He got the least glamorous work on the list of “possible” projects, largely because it is the most common type of work that is done (website dev and backend traditional database/Java work).
Financial services can be a very good career $ wise, not a bad way to get started.
But don’t get trapped by having to work on ML. Take an offer that is reasonable in a location you are willing to live. What I told my son was turn down any offer you are not excited about, but if you accept, and later something amazing comes along, just be very very selective before you change your mind. I would reneg for Google, but not many employers.
Congrats on the job and the award!!
@NEPatsGirl Congrats to your D!