they should make a job common app

December 25, 2010 8:53 PM

Home for break - how can I most effectively search and apply for local computer science jobs?

I'm a senior Computer Science major at a small, highly ranked liberal arts college that is not at all known for their CS program. I'm home for winter break (my last one!), and I'm looking for a job after graduation. I've already managed to get rejected from the top corporations (Microsoft, Amazon, etc), so I'm looking for more mid-sized companies to apply to. I'm home in the Seattle area for winter break, and Seattle is one of the places I'd like to end up after graduation.

My question is this: How can I best use being physically in the Seattle area to my advantage when I apply to Seattle-area jobs? Since I'm usually on the east coast, I can only apply online and such - is there a better way, now that I'm actually here? Plus, I'm only here for another two weeks...I realize this might be a silly question, but I'd appreciate all the help I can get.

posted by arkitex to Work & Money (3 answers total)

Best answer: Several high priorities for you are actually more doable back at school, e.g. meeting with professional development counselors to have your resume critiqued or to have a practice interview. And others, like finding out about job opportunities in Seattle efficiently or working on open source projects that demonstrate your skills to the world, are things you will mostly do over the internet wherever you are.

I suppose if you have family friends who're in the area who could advise on things like that (e.g. if they manage software developers and see resumes all the time), then meeting with them to talk about your resume or the things they've heard about places to work would be sort of a way of using your home location, but it's not like there's a way to arrange walk-in interviews anywhere or any likelihood that an HR department will consider your actual presence to be a bonus.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:22 AM on December 26, 2010

Oh, there do exist local user's group meet-ups for many programming languages (etc.), and if they happen to be meeting in the next two weeks, it's possible you'd hear about some opportunities there.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:25 AM on December 26, 2010

Get out to as many programmer / techie / start up meets ups as you can in the next two weeks. Unfortunately, due to the holidays there probably won't be many.
posted by COD at 6:03 AM on December 26, 2010 [1 favorite]