Recruiting at SFA
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I got to spend 2 days back in Nac for some presentations and on-campus recruiting at SFA. I drove up on Tuesday morning and made it there in about 2 hours (going the speed limit, of course). Drove straight to the campus, got a visitor parking pass from the UPD (University Police Department) and proceeded to the UC - or what used to be the UC.
There was some major changes to the campus since my last visit including a brand new Student Center and it was big. Much bigger and nicer than the old UC. To my surprise was the commercialization of the campus. Trying not to sound too old, back in my day the choices to eat on campus were all Aramark-run, cafeteria style meals and they were absolutely horrible. People always laugh about the freshman 15 at other campuses but st SFA, the freshman 15 meant you LOST 15 pounds because the food was gross. What do they have now? Chick-Fil-A. Starbucks (2 of them). Panda Express. A retail type convienent store. They even had a branch of Commercial Bank. How things change. I got my starbucks and headed for the business building.
The core of the campus was pretty much unchanged. Beautiful as ever and the students have changed only slightly. They are still all walking around oblivious to the real world and not fully appreciating how nice they have it (but I digress). Headed for the 3rd floor of the business building and took the stairs I walked a million times before. Memories flowed like a river as I walked into the computer science department.
The professors were as great as ever. Dr. Pickard and I spent some time prior to class discussing some of the major developments to have happened since my graduation, such as technology changes and outsourcing concerns. I met with Mr. Harber, Dr. Dunn, and Mr. Long for a few minutes as well and discussed the same things - what they are doing, what I am doing, etc. Everyone seemed truly excited for us to be there and everyone remarked they looked forward to the Scrum presentation later that afternoon.
The presentation to the 426 class went very well up until the end. The overview of my current employer as well as the information related to business procurement, project management policies and methodologies were all well accepted by the audience and they seemed to enjoy the discussion. Then I got to the technology and I completely lost them. I started talking JSF, Hibernate, Spring and patterns and the "glaze" came over their faces. I had made the age old mistake of going in to a presentation without fully understanding the audience. I made the assumption our current CS students would be more worldly to the technologies that run the internet but I guess not. I could have spent another 3 hours just giving background but decided to wrap it up, chalk it up to experience and opened for questions.
The Scrum presentation in the afternoon went a lot smoother. Scrum is not very technical and is considered more of a common sense, logical approach to software development. I actually had a couple of guys, Ian being one of them, who were already aware of agile and scrum. Based on the feedback from the professors and the students, I need to change a slide or two but overall, they enjoyed the information. Quite frankly, I enjoyed acting like a professor for a day. We ended with a huge feast of pizza and some additional discussion about consulting and my expereineces in general. Headed to the hotel, got changed, met with some friends at Bullfrogs and then headed to Shack. Overall, a great Tuesday.
On Wedsnesday, the job fair went well. I was targeting only a small portion of people (about 10 to 12 total) so I was idle for much of the day, spending my time answering the basic questions ("so, uh, like, what do ya'll do") and trying to chat it up with some other booth attendants. Got to talk more with some of the CS students throughout the day and again, I was very impressed by the graduates of SFA's computer science department. To this day, I'll put my guys against any other school and not worry.
So let this hopefully be the start of a recurring theme. I'll be headed back soon to do some on-campus interviews and will be back in the fall, hopefully as part of the advisory committee.