I have a job!
Yes, I have a job! I was offered, and accepted, a position as a "software engineer II" at Raytheon. I'm quite happy. Raytheon was towards the top of my list of companies I wanted to work for. Actually, it was pretty much even between Raytheon and another company for the #1 spot in my mind.
I interviewed with Raytheon here on campus, but this particular position I actually found on my own, online. It was one of the first jobs I applied to in my job search -- way back in December! I visited Raytheon over my spring break, and was very impressed with the people there and the projects they are working on. I went into that interview not sure how I felt about Raytheon (largely because I didn't really know what they worked on) but came away excited and hopeful something would come of it.
So, that is exciting. It feels good to know I have a job, not knowing was a constant source of stress. I actually ended up with another job offer as well, which was good. The other one interested me as well, but not quite as much as Raytheon.
Also, this semester has turned out to be (surprise, surprise!) quite hectic. I am enjoying my MEng project a lot. I'm basically working on my own (within a group) on using information retrieval techniques to do text classification. Most of what I'm doing is writing Perl scripts that interface with Lemur to automate the process of converting text into a form useable by IR techniques, collecting results, etc. Interesting stuff. My software engineering group has ended up implementing a search engine for Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management library. It's actually been quite good. We're taking an existing search engine, PhpDig, and significantly overhauling it so that it works better and meets all of the requirements of the Management Library. I've been impressed that everyone in this group is quite good and bright, and no one seems to really be slacking off. That is always good.
For my machine learning course, I am doing my semester project on developing a system to predict trends in the stock market. This is actually a great project because this topic already interested me and I had developed a prototype of this system on my own earlier in the semester, using techniques we were learning about in the course. So it really does apply and really does interest me. Also, networks is interesting but the project we are working on right now is very very hard to develop -- largely because there's lots of little detailsthat can go wrong and which are hard to debug. I spent two and a half hours today which pretty much just resulted in me fixing one line of code. But, at least that line got fixed.
There really isn't much going on in my life other than school / job search related stuff. If anyone reads this who hasn't talked to me in a while... leave a message! And if you read this and have never talked to me before... leave a message!
I interviewed with Raytheon here on campus, but this particular position I actually found on my own, online. It was one of the first jobs I applied to in my job search -- way back in December! I visited Raytheon over my spring break, and was very impressed with the people there and the projects they are working on. I went into that interview not sure how I felt about Raytheon (largely because I didn't really know what they worked on) but came away excited and hopeful something would come of it.
So, that is exciting. It feels good to know I have a job, not knowing was a constant source of stress. I actually ended up with another job offer as well, which was good. The other one interested me as well, but not quite as much as Raytheon.
Also, this semester has turned out to be (surprise, surprise!) quite hectic. I am enjoying my MEng project a lot. I'm basically working on my own (within a group) on using information retrieval techniques to do text classification. Most of what I'm doing is writing Perl scripts that interface with Lemur to automate the process of converting text into a form useable by IR techniques, collecting results, etc. Interesting stuff. My software engineering group has ended up implementing a search engine for Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management library. It's actually been quite good. We're taking an existing search engine, PhpDig, and significantly overhauling it so that it works better and meets all of the requirements of the Management Library. I've been impressed that everyone in this group is quite good and bright, and no one seems to really be slacking off. That is always good.
For my machine learning course, I am doing my semester project on developing a system to predict trends in the stock market. This is actually a great project because this topic already interested me and I had developed a prototype of this system on my own earlier in the semester, using techniques we were learning about in the course. So it really does apply and really does interest me. Also, networks is interesting but the project we are working on right now is very very hard to develop -- largely because there's lots of little detailsthat can go wrong and which are hard to debug. I spent two and a half hours today which pretty much just resulted in me fixing one line of code. But, at least that line got fixed.
There really isn't much going on in my life other than school / job search related stuff. If anyone reads this who hasn't talked to me in a while... leave a message! And if you read this and have never talked to me before... leave a message!
