I'm at a job fair and the people I want to talk with are finally back from lunch. I've seen their job announcements on the IEEE site and I was delighted to see their table at this fair. Even better, they have circuit boards lying on their table—circuit boards with FPGAs on! So while I've been hitting the other employers (the avionics people are nice and looking for computer engineers as well), I've been drifting by this table and ogling the circuit boards.
But now the recruiters are back and surprise me by actually reading my resume. They flip it over and see the list of academic projects I stuck on there to provide tantalizing keywords for automated resume crawlers. They proceed to grill me on each one. "So, what kind of filter was that?" "What all have you done with VHDL?" "Did you put that microprocessor you implemented on an FPGA?" "Do you have experience with DSP?" And on. And on. I dredge up details about stuff I did semesters ago.
This goes on for some time.
One of them (I check his card later and find that he's the vice president who deals with hardware design) smiles and says how he's glad to find someone who's actually learned in school.
This has me wondering about my competition. Because how can anyone even survive engineering school without learning?
They also tell me all about their circuit boards and the cool things they design. I make a mental note to retrieve my DSP book from the guy who borrowed it, especially after they tell me that one of their HR people will be calling me.
275 words | March 14, 2005 10:38 PM | Real true storySome people just don't care. They take the class, then forget everything afterwards. Or don't try and connect the dots. Call me optimistic, but I tend to think that 90% of the people out there left their brains at home, and don't mind a bit. Good employers are always looking for the other 10%.
Posted by: Derek at March 15, 2005 03:22 AMWell, that would explain a lot. I'm always amazed at how people don't study and then depend on the curve (especially when there's always someone who's going to break it).
Posted by: Nee-chama at March 15, 2005 10:41 PM