Write a function, Coop => {Coop, Copo, Cpoo, oCop, oCpo, ooCp, oopC, opCo, opoC, pCoo, poCo, pooC}
The first two months of my summer term were fraught with the responsibilities necessary for finding a job. Though I don’t have a lot of experience searching for jobs, I consider the co-op program at the University of Waterloo (where I study Computer Science) to be pretty great. Indeed, through it I’ve found my first full-time position of employment in my field —- Software Developer at Relay! Additionally, I’ve gained a lot of job searching skills. This post will talk about my experience with the University of Waterloo co-op program (with resume tips!) and I’ll post about my new employment in the future sometime.
First I guess I’ll give my thoughts about the co-op program here. This program certainly doesn’t spoon-feed those who are in it. Resume and cover letter writing, going to info-sessions, applying to jobs, interviewing, and post-interview correspondence is the responsibility of the student. What stands out most among the things which the co-op program here has done for me is,
- Made the application process relatively painless; JobMine just has a huge list of employers, and to apply I just submit my .pdf resume.
- Provided deadlines for me so that I get things done. Having the “You need to write a resume by this week. You need to apply for jobs on this weekend.” saved me from having to create my own schedules and goals and things for the job search.
- (Additionally, there are workshops here for touching up on any of the aforementioned skills. I didn’t use these though)
The three things which I believe helped my resume stand out most as a Computer Science student were,
- My resume was written in LaTeX. In particular, this is the template I used. One of my interviewers basically said “blah blah, I can tell that you go above and beyond because, I mean, this resume is written in LaTeX, which is awesome.”
- I put my extracurricular projects on my resume. This is especially important because I have no experience working in the field of Computer Science. Note that these weren’t things I’d made before university. They were: a raytracer (which I wrote in C++ just because everyone at the CSC was making one), a Google Chrome extension (which I made at a facebook hackathon with some friends SHOUT OUT TO LIAM HORNE HEMING ZHANG AND NIMA VAZIRI) and a blogging engine thing (see here). Every single interview (of 12) I went to asked me about the projects I put on my resume.
- I put my online education on my resume right alongside my University CS education. I have taken a few courses online at Udacity and I put them on my resume right after my relevant school courses. I can’t make a “proof by my interviewer interacted with me about this particular thing” about this, but I still feel like it’s a good way of showing that you’re motivated.
Admittedly, though, I have had a relatively great experience; I have heard of several unfortunate and out-of-students’-control things happening (like, for example, to my friend Si Te who’s job just got cancelled this week; or my friend Jacob who had a company essentially say they’ll hire him, and then not rank him at all in JobMine).
The coolest thing, having had an opportunity to reflect on everything myself just now after writing about it, is that you don’t need good work experience to get a good entry-level CS job. Now, I’m not going to be a software engineer at Google on my first work term; more school and work experience is probably necessary for that. But, with only two terms of studying Computer Science here at UW and my three side projects which probably took about 50 hours total of hacking around, I secured a sweet entry-level software development position.
Also, since you’re probably reading this because I posted it on facebook, you can of course feel free to message me to chat about co-op more. I’d love to hear what your experience were (if you’re a student) or answer questions (if you’re a frosh or someone else who hasn’t been on co-op yet).
/src/reigh