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Advertising Your Availability
A well written resume is one of the first steps to landing an internship. A well written resume can help you standout from a crowd and also make a good impression on your future employers before they even meet you. The ability to write a good resume is a skill that must be learned.
One of the best resources available to JMU students is the TSC 210 course, an introduction to technical and scientific communication. This course is an important addition to the skills that are learned in the Computer Science department. This class is designed to improve writing skills and provide instruction for writing various business and technical documents properly. The class textbook is a very valuable resource. It provides resume examples of various different types as well as direction on what type of information to include, where information should be placed, and how best to present all of the pertinent information. The professor is also an important resource because of the valuable feedback and corrections he or she may provide when you update your resume during the course. If this class is taken sooner rather than later it could prove to be very valuable when preparing to find an internship.
JMU also has several career services available to its students. One of these services is called MadisonTRAK. MadisonTRAK allows students to participate in on-campus interviewing, conduct mock interviews to practice interviewing skills, talk to employers through the employer-in-residence program, and view the list of companies that attend on-campus career fairs. This service also allows you to post your resume and a profile that is viewable by employers. Students may specify the geographic locations they would like to work, the fields in which they would be interested working in, contact information, and other information such as grade point averages, majors, and minors. I posted my resume on MadisonTRAK and was contacted by a company in Northern Virginia but I decided to pursue a new offer from my previous employer.
I update my resume every year to include everything I have accomplished up to that year including job experience, certifications I may be pursuing or have completed, my academic career progress, and any outside activities I am involved. It is important to keep your resume up to date so that it is always ready to send out to potential employers.
Finding out about Job Openings
I have held four different internship positions at two different companies. I found out about these positions and setup interviews through my family and friends. Family and friends are one of the best resources you have when you are looking for an internship position. Call friends and family and talk to them about your interest in a computer science related internship. They may be able to introduce you to someone in the field and set the process of landing an internship in motion.
My father is a lobbyist for the Delaware Healthcare Association. A large amount of his job involves work with the state legislature and other lobbyists in the state during the legislative sessions which last from January through June. He has contacts all over Delaware and other surrounding states. This turned out to be a huge advantage for me. The positions I have held have been a result of a company representative contacting me after my father spoke with someone at the state legislature. My mother is the office manager of a Catholic elementary school. She also asked several parents involved in computer science related fields. My efforts and my parents’ contacts resulted in several different options for summer employment. You would be surprised how just asking around can lead to internship opportunities.
Landing your internship
I have had the opportunity to work as an intern for the Delaware Department of Technology and Information (DTI) for the past three summers. My father knew the Secretary of the Department through the state legislature. I sent Secretary Jarrett a copy of my resume via e-mail. He gave my resume to his Chief Technology Officer, Elayne Starkey. Elayne called me the next day and conducted a phone interview to find out more about me and what I was interested in pursuing. I was very excited to learn that Elayne was a JMU Computer Science graduate. After the interview she put me in contact with Michael Malik, the team leader of the Customer Care department. The first two positions I held at DTI, during the summer of 2004 and 2005, were technical writing positions. I was also exposed to almost every other team within DTI. I worked with Elayne directly on several projects which resulted in a great working relationship. This past school year I was initially looking for an internship in the Harrisonburg area since I had an off-campus apartment and I was interested in new opportunities outside of technical writing.
However, I went home for Christmas break and I e-mailed Elayne to ask if there were any new opportunities available at DTI for next summer. She responded asking me to meet her in town so that we could discuss the opportunities in person. She explained to me that next summer (summer of 2006) she would be transitioning from the role of Chief Technology Officer to the role of Chief Security Officer. She would be leading the new Security Team at DTI which would handle all aspects of physical and cyber security. She offered me a position on this new team as an intern. I would be working on various projects for the security team and I would report directly to her. I am pursuing the NSA security certificate sequence at JMU and I am very interested in information security so this position sounded like the perfect opportunity for me. I sent an updated copy of my resume to Elayne and informally accepted the position. DTI’s human resources department sent me an offer letter which I signed and returned.
As spring semester was beginning to end I contacted DTI Human Resources and Elayne to setup an appointment in advance to meet at DTI to complete more required paper work and go through a Delaware State Police background check which were all required for employment.
DTI is a secure facility (which is why I do not have any pictures of the building due to web publishing restrictions) monitored by security cameras, capital police, and the building is completely tinted. The first time I had been to DTI three years ago to conduct an interview in person, the process was somewhat daunting. My driver’s license was scanned and I was given a visitor pass. I had to be escorted at all times. All of this made me a little bit nervous but once I was introduced in person to my employers and the human resources staff I was able to relax. Looking back on the interview experiences I learned that is very important to be up front and ask questions early. It is important to know everything there is to know about the position you are applying for so you know exactly what can you expect. Asking questions also helps show an interest in the position to your employer beyond the desire for a job.
Also, taking care of all of the hiring requirements as early as possible was vital to making my experiences as smooth as possible. I learned this from previous summer sessions. I would usually wait until I got home in May to worry about obtaining a job. The reality is, by the time I got home employers had already filled internship positions with candidates that did not wait or employers were not interested in hiring someone for such a short period of time and I was stuck accepting something I had no interest in. This time I took care of everything early. With all of the basic requirements out of the way, I was able to start work early, and hit the ground running with my projects. I took advantage of the entire limited amount of time I spent at DTI this summer.
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