Seven New York teenagers were caught cheating on the SAT and arrested: the one guy taking the exams and the six students he impersonated.
I think the even more asinine fact of this story is that we’re still paying College Board and ETS millions of dollars so that colleges can think they’re making the right decisions during the admissions process.
Here’s an infographic of top programming languages that I like: interesting, colorful, printable. This one clearly shows the popularity of various languages in multiple domains: a research index, book titles, IRC discussion, and job postings.
You can view more of the data at the now-for-sale LangPop.com, which I recommend checking out to see what those “other” languages are. It’s a good instrument in deciding what languages you want to take a stab at if you’re feeling adventurous.
(Source: IEEE spectrum – a must-follow.)
I’ve made tons of mistakes (and hit just as many obstacles) in the process of getting from high school to where I’m at now. Granted, I only graduated high school eight years ago, but it was a long and difficult journey. Fortunately, I jumped right into it with a thick skin, a chip on my shoulder, and the mindset that anything worthwhile I try to do was going to be a major pain in my ass – boy, was I right! You can probably see, now, why I like to write about my experiences here, why I do the work that I do, and where I get all this snark from.
Students and graduates are having a rough time right now when it comes to finding employment in their fields of interest, and sometimes I feel that it’s because they go about “doing college” completely wrong. The reason why I bring this all up is because a student recently asked me if I had any advice for them in terms of making sure they make the most of their undergraduate years here. The following are a few important points that I discuss whenever I’m asked this question.
Think outside the classroom.
This means self-study, creating your own projects, and collaboration with other students or mentors. Don’t expect these things to fall on your lap, you need to work for it. And never stop reading and creating. That goes for after graduation as well.
Graduate with more than a degree.
Besides a Bachelors and/or Masters degree, you need to leave school with a solid resume and portfolio. Degrees don’t hold water on its own; you need to plug the holes with applications you’ve built, projects in and out of the classroom that you’ve worked on, and relevant employment. You can pay your way through school, but what you’ve done during that time is what separates you from the others during the big interview.
Have relevant work experience.
Any school that says they’ll guarantee employment is lying to you. Relevant employment is hard as hell to find when you’re still an undergrad, so start early. Try to find an internship or take advantage of any coop programs your school may have. If you can’t find work experience, do what I did: create your own. I started a web design and development business right out of high school, and it’s the main reason why I’ve been successful since graduation.
Network, network, network.
Networking is so important to college students, and joining various associations can help you in the process. If you’re in Computer Science or IT, look into associations like ACM or IEEE. Student memberships are usually dirt cheap and carry incredible perks, like free software licenses and e-book library access. And if there are conferences nearby, or your school gives you the opportunity to travel to one, go!
BE F’ING NICE!
I can’t stress this enough. Entitlement and jerkitude™ is a major turn-off for me, your peers, and potential employers. Just because you have a technical degree or know more about computers than the guy next to you on the bus, it does not mean you won’t have to start from the bottom of the totem pole. Do coffee runs and shred documents with a smile on your face, and prove your worth. The person you’re giving attitude to today may be interviewing you tomorrow.
That’s all I’ve got for now.
An important thing to remember is that it’s never too late, even if you’ve graduated, to start improving your “game.” You just need to work extra harder to make up for lost time. And don’t be intimidated by people much younger than you being more successful than you – you have more wisdom, experience, and common sense to create your own path to success…I hope.
Do you have any horror stories that have changed the way you thought about college and finding employment? Is my advice unbelievably awful? Do you have any tidbits of wisdom to pass on to students? Let me know in the comments.
A recurring “fact” that I’ve seen people put on their Twitter and personal site biographies is that they’re “addicted to coffee.” I think that’s just so bizarre! I once went to an Alateen meeting and someone ended their introduction with “and I’m addicted to coffeeeeee!” in the most hilariously sing-song voice I’ve ever heard. It seems all so trite, and kind of strange, to be introducing yourself as an addict of anything (especially in Alateen – I mean, seriously). And I’m not ragging on people who drink and/or love and/or are addicted to coffee. I fall in the all-of-the-above category.
I used to be afraid of coffee as a kid, unlike many of my friends who begged their parents to let them drink it. If you ever wonder why your kids are begging you for a sip, it totally has to do with the way you behave before and after you drink it. We adults make it seem like it’s our lifeline, like it makes our day better. And if you don’t think that kids have bad days, you are an idiot. And you obviously haven’t had your coffee yet.
I used to make coffee most mornings as Young Child Jenn Schiffer™. We had a Black and Decker coffee maker mounted to the wall for as long as I could remember, and it was really easy to set up. As a means to disassociate myself from my parents – specifically their addictions and behavior – I vowed to never drink the alcy, smoke, or partake in this oddly universal love of coffee. Coffee seemed like gasoline to me; the look, smell and consistency (probably because sometimes I, a ten-year-old, was making it), and the way it would change the way adults acted towards me before and after its consumption…these were all reasons I was afraid to drink the stuff.
It wasn’t until I started college and met my best friend, Michelle, that I started drinking coffee. Michelle is cool as hell. She had a single-cup coffee maker in her dorm, which she hid (unplugged) underneath her desk. One day she had a thermos of the stuff waiting for me (for me! What a gal!) when I met her before we walked to class. I remember how pissed we were when the RA took it away (jerks).
When Jimmy and I started dating, we used to spend our nights at the Toms River Diner, drinking coffee until the early morning. Diners were cool to hang out in then, because smoking was allowed indoors and so it was attractive to us young folks wanting to hang out. Little else makes you feel more adult than drinking a strong cup of coffee and debating with a new love over the appropriateness of naming your future child “Captain.”
So, as you can see, I’ve had an interesting and unique relationship with coffee, as it’s had strange ties to people I’ve despised or adored. I love good coffee, caffeinated or decaffeinated, and I don’t see myself giving it up ever. But who knows, maybe I’ll have a bad experience while drinking a cup and become completely disgusted with it all over again. That’s just the kind of person I am. I once fell while eating a bologna sandwich, and haven’t eaten one since. Maybe I’ll put that in my Twitter bio.
This was my first Facebook status ever.
The new Facebook timeline sucked up at least 2 hours of my weekend, as I looked back into the past of Young Undergraduate Jenn Schiffer™, trying to get insight into what I was like almost six years ago. Besides my self-deprecating, talking-to-myself statuses (which have not ceased, as you would know if you were my friend), a lot of the earlier posts on my wall were from friends saying things like “FINALLY!” and “It’s about time!” – which I assume was in response to my hesitation to join the social network revolution that was beginning right before us.
Until that point, “social networking” to me was blogging on LiveJournal about learning how to design websites and how I was dealing with the messed up relationships (or lack thereof) with my family. The last thing I wanted was to do was sign up to another site and read superficial comments from most of my superficial high school friends. I just wanted to eat lunch with my new college mates and pretend that I was an orphan that found her way to north Jersey by way of spaceships and a Bright Eyes soundtrack.
Since we all graduated and moved out of our dorms, Facebook became an integral way of staying connected. No longer did we have our routine lunch and dinner meetings, or life on the same residence hall floor. We never really got into texting or calling. One thing we all loved, though, was the Internet. And Facebook and LiveJournal were, and still are, ways that we stay connected. For that, I could never see myself deleting my account, no matter how many times a week I consider it.
Facebook is more to me than just social networking, though. It’s a great study on how people react to change and privacy – two issues that folks still seem to struggle with on the ever-changing World Wide Web. Anyone that works in software engineering or web development should have these issues on their mind whenever they design or build anything, as it is communication with your users that shape your work and your reputation.
I understand the anger towards never-ending user interface changes; I got heartburn when Jimmy showed me our new cable remote last month (all those buttons, gahhh…). And my take on privacy is that there is no digital privacy. I expect anything I put out there to be used against me in a court of society. I’m just happy to have privacy settings that give me a means to filter who I want to have easy access to my information. You’ll find no scandalous photos on this woman’s phone, that’s for sure.
Facebook is my way of letting some people know “You are my friend, either in real life or on the Web. Now walk with me in this ridiculous journey of me yelling at myself.” It’s a blessing, a curse, and much less invasive than texting, calling, or knocking on my neighbor’s door whenever I want to rant about NJ Transit ruining my day.
That’s my Facebook story.
There was this girl in the sixth grade that one day decided she was going to bully me, probably because everyone else bullied her and I was pretty chilled out then (read: anti-social). She came up to me out of nowhere, one day, and said “you’re a bitch” and was visibly startled when I responded “um, you’re a bitch?”
She told the principal, because she was an idiot, and we both were sentenced to a day of in-school suspension, also known as “Tank.”
She got out of it by crying and telling the guidance counselor that she was just having a rough time with the transition from elementary school to middle school (as I’m sure her parents coached her to say) and the changes that went with it. I, of course, still had to go to the Tank, because I knew that asking for coaching by my dad and stepmom meant telling them I called someone a bitch, which would only lead to my homicide.
The moral of this story is: if you get arrested in the near future, blame it on the “new Facebook” changes.
Matt Gemmell’s post, SEO for Non-dicks, ended up on Hacker News the other day. Normally, I get douche chills when reading posts about SEO. I think this one is important to read, though – including the comments.
I’m asked sometimes for advice on building an internet presence, and I usually have to fumble for an answer – because I haven’t pursued any particular strategy beyond the glaringly obvious: create original, relevant content repeatedly.
This is where Gemmell is on point. I get requests or questions on the weekly from clients and non-clients asking me to advise or actually help in “boosting” their SEO – or “Search Engine Optimization” for you lucky ones that have never heard the phrase. I have no interest in telling clients to make fake sites, spam other blogs, or plagiarise. A lot of the popular SEO tactics used are unethical, and it’s something that I have to deal with all the time when people scrape my own content or use other slimy spamdexing tactics to make it to the top of search engine results.
I just want to build you a website, and build it damn well and efficiently. And I want you to fill that site up with good content, and do it damn well and often.
As a web developer hired to build you a website or application, there are certainly tips and “tricks” I use to make sure that your site is readable to a search engine, just like the one’s listed by Gemmell. Those things I can do, and you are more than welcome to ask me if I am doing them to be sure – you’re paying for me to code, and you want your money’s worth!
My code and your content will be more than enough to gain followers and peak search engine results…in a perfect world.
I pose to you the problem many clients have of existing in a space where it’s not possible to simply write good fucking content. Or if you’re competing in a space that is so totally overwhelmingly competitive that the only hope you have is to buy links and generate fake blog networks?
I would never condone these tactics or do them myself because I’m not a dick, but you can’t generalize the tactics used for SEO-ing a blog for all types of businesses IMO. Businesses compete in a lot of ways, and in the open market of the Internet they’ll go where they need to go to get ahead. - commenter, Tyler 20 characters
Here is where you need to realize how important reading the comments in a popular blog post is, as you’ll get the perspective beyond the writer and his fans – especially when the site comes up on a popular social news site. Once you weed out the assholes and the spammers, you get insightful ones like the one above. Reading on, you’ll see that this perfect world of just creating “original, relevant content repeatedly” is a pipe dream for those in large and general fields with an overwhelming amount of competition (car insurance, Italian food, psychiatry, mommy blogging, etc). You can be the most entertaining and well-written person ever, but if you’re entering a field of vast competition, your quick wit and unending charm may simply not be enough.
Some of these commenters have been doing SEO for over 10 years (does one do SEO? That sounds weird to me). To them, it’s a legitimate business that became saturated with con-artists and unemployed ignoramuses looking to make some easy ca$h monies on people who just want to build an audience or following. That happens to all job fields though, especially when the Web is involved, so I understand their vitriol when they are generalized as a group of modern-day “snake oil salesmen.”
Regardless, I still have to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets when a client complains that my “SEO isn’t working” for them, when I’ve never told them that I “did SEO” or said that I would get them to the top of Google search results.
You can’t just create content for a site with no audience and expect magic and riches to happen. Sometimes you need to do outreach. Bring the audience to you.
* Use social networking to your advantage. Connect with people who you think will be interested, but don’t spam people; it’s counterproductive and a major turn-off. And be human! I get companies following me on Twitter that only aggregate other companies’ news and provide nothing interesting to me. Then they auto-DM me and I block them. See, counterproductive.
* Read and comment on blogs that are related to your work so you become part of a community of folks who may find your writing or services to be of interest to them. If you write meaningful comments, you’ll attract other commenters and bloggers. Some of my favorite and longest-lasting clients are people with blogs that I’ve read and commented on or read my blog regularly. Some of them are people I’ve hired to do work as well. Aha! Networking!
* You need to update regularly. If you are going on hiatus, post that announcement on your site and social networking sites. If I don’t hear from a blog or Twitter feed in weeks, I’ll unsubscribe or unfollow them. You really shouldn’t go on hiatus to begin with, though. If you are taking a leave or vacation, then set up scheduled posts or hire a temp/intern to hold down the fort while you’re out.
If your strategy isn’t working out, or you don’t have the time to take part in it, then go ahead and hire an SEO expert. You need to do your research, though, and don’t feel obligated to hire the first person offering to do the work (this applies to anyone you hire, really). Also, don’t sell anyone short by expecting cheap work (you get what you pay for, yada yada yada…) and make it clear that you don’t want unethical practices, which may do more harm than good, to be used.
All in all, the best advice I can give is to educate yourself about SEO and the vast amount of work it takes to create and maintain a credible and reliable website, as well as building a following. If you wait until the 11th hour to think of these things, well, that’s when you end up failing or becoming vulnerable to “dicks.”
Also, don’t ask me to do SEO for you. I’m not an expert, and I don’t want to be. I also do not know any SEO experts, but I’m always looking to meet one.
The writer’s first step is to “pick a project,” which is what I always tell people that are looking to start programming or building a website. If you want to learn a language (programming, markup, European, etc), the best way to do it is to jump in and immerse yourself. Because that can be incredibly intimidating, having a project is great way to jump in with a goal in mind.
Even if you hit a point where you realize that the language you’re using does not work for what you’re building, you at least learned something.
Jimmy and I watched Hackers for the first time as a couple this weekend. Yeah, I know, 7 years and no Hackers. How did we communicate? How come no one is outside Rollerblading™ inline skating right now?
Sometimes people ask me if I know how to “hack.” I tell them that it was easy to figure out that my first AOL screen name password was science123, and that I owned a pink leopard-print shirt when I was a college undergrad.
What would your hacker name be? Your identity? Jimmy and I agreed that mine would be babygirlmoney, because I use it on the World Wide Web all of the time anyway. Jimmy’s hacker name would be Marc Anthony, because he’s my favorite part of Hackers.
Hackers gets two German/Norwegian thumbs up. Great fashion, great nostalgia, and Marc Anthony. You can stream the movie instantly on Qwikflixsterhubnation.
My name is Jenn. pancake theorem is my blog and it's full of stuff about web development, academia, industry, being a woman, blah blah blarg.
