I am now the proud graduate of college, sporting a fancy BS in Computer Science. I have to say that even though it was not from one of the most prestigious schools I still feel that it was a major accomplishment in my life. I have spent 4 hard years at a school that discontinued my major half-way through and continued to fight me with revisions and changes to the academic system. I often wonder if I made the right choice staying at a school that discontinued my major, I feel like I have inadvertently sold myself short and now that has seemingly forced me to work twice as hard to achieve my goals. If there is one thing that I have learned though, it is that some of the best rewards in life come when you start as the underdog and that you cant lose your spirit.
Now that I am a graduate I had to find work and a place of my own. I was originally told by my internship that they would hire me and I was in a state of euphoria for being hired just like that. With my internship company chomping at the bit I pushed very hard for myself and my three roommates to get an apartment so that I could start work right away. I unfortunately learned that some people can be easily swept up in fast talking and have the tendency to say yes first and then think later. This would ultimately cause us not to get the apartment because one of my future roommates had cold feet the day we were supposed to sign the lease. Back at square one I looked for the most motivated of my prospective roommates and told him that we should seek out an apartment. And here I am now in my apartment, it had a great charm when we first saw it and yes I'll admit I rushed this place as well. I suppose that old habits truly do die hard. Well once we moved in we discovered that we are directly in the flight path for airplanes coming in to Boston. We also soon discovered that there is nothing to do besides go into the city, a rather expensive habit that we try to avoid. When we were initially here I was starting to have second thoughts about living here, Oh I forgot to mention. Remember the internship that promised me a job out-of-the-box?
Well it turns out that first I had to call them incessantly to get told that I would need to apply for the position online to make it "official". Then the application was not even truly online, they expected me to fax them my resume. I was so taken aback that a company would post a job online but then require a faxed copy of a resume, they really displayed a grasp on today's moving technology. After trying to find a fax machine, yeah I have no land line in my apartment so I had to search for an alternate method, I finally got the resume to them and waited. It has now been two weeks since I sent them my resume and I feel like the biggest fool. not only have they not officially contacted me but I have also heard from the people who work there that I will be subjected to two entrance interviews once my application is approved. Apparently guarantees are a very subjective manner and I learned that you should never take words at face value, because they honestly have no meaning or power.
As far as I see it their delay might actually be a blessing in disguise. While the benefits of this job would be truly amazing it's not really the proffesion that I want to be part of. I have worked in an IT department my entire collegiate carrer and, I have learned that while fixing people's computers, installing software etc. comes rather naturally to me it's boring and dissatisfying 98.5% of the time. Usually it is always the same three problems that everyone experiences and in my experiences most users dont want to learn how to do and fix on their own they'd much rather just have me fix everything while they do something else. That could be my flaw, I just always want to teach people about technology because I am so fascinated with it. I always want to learn new things and discover how something works so I tend to assume that everyone shares that same philosophy and when someone could care less about what you're trying to tech them it's rather discouraging. Not being hired yet has allowed me to work on a few side projects, such as learning new a new database language, brushing up on a few languages I am already familiar with, and try to learn more than basic webdesigning skills. I've also taken the huge dose of reality and decided to start applying for jobs that require programming. Programming has always been my true love and the real reason I jumped into computer science. Ever since I did my first program with Lego Mindstorms I just knew I wanted to learn more advanced languages and make computer programs.
So that's where I am in a nutshell. Jobless, in an interesting home (did I mention we have silverfish?) and trying to becoma a better programmer so I have a chance at being hired at a programming job.
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