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Great jobs are plentiful for Institute of Technology graduates in today's employment market
by kermit pattison
JOSHUA JOHNSON'S COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREE took him to the largest computer software company in the world. Johnson works as a systems engineer at Microsoft on the Windows Live Experience team.
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| Joshua Johnson (CSci ’07) used internships to gain a toehold into the professional world spending two semesters as a production intern at Symantec in Cupertino, Calif. Before joining Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., he worked as an intern on the Windows
Live Experience team, the same team he now works with full-time. |
“Every day there’s something new,” he said. “We’re really pushing that edge of innovation. It’s quite a bit of fun.”
Johnson’s team supports about 25 online services. They help create system architectures that enable services to scale up globally with georedundancy. In other words, as he translates half in jest, “We create
systems that ensure if one of the coasts breaks off and falls into the ocean, taking out multiple data centers, the end user does not notice a change.”
Johnson is not alone in seeking work outside the region. According to Sorenson-Wagner, more Institute
of Technology grads are finding jobs in other regions or abroad. In 2005, 82 percent of graduates took a job in Minnesota; two years later that number dropped to 67 percent.
Johnson didn’t catch the computer bug until college.
He grew up on a sheep farm in Wisconsin and would routinely wake up at 6 a.m.—4 a.m. in the spring—to do chores before school. “Growing up, my technical electronics was mostly fixing various farm equipment,” he recalls. “I always liked to take apart broken electronics to see how they worked, but I was terrible at putting them back together.”
He planned to become an electrical engineer until
he took his first college computer science class. “I had a lot of fun and thought, ‘Wait, people can do this for a living?’” he recalls. “So I switched majors and decided to start programming.”
He transferred to the University of Minnesota from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and buckled down in his studies. His favorite classes included
artificial intelligence with professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos and operating systems with associate
professor Jon Weissman, both of the computer science and engineering department.
Johnson’s classes exposed him to many technologies
and systems—including languages such as C, C++, PHP, HTML, Lisp and Python, Javascript, ActionScript,
and CGI—and this technological multilingualism
has served him well at Microsoft.
Like many millennials, he used internships to gain a toehold in the professional world. He spent two semesters
working as a production intern at Symantec.
His second internship at Microsoft had an unlikely start.
“Somehow my resume got misfiled and I ended up interviewing for an accounting position,” he recalls. “I’m like most kids these days—I never balance my checkbook, and I rely on online payments. I was really
up front with them and said I know nothing about accounting. We ended up chatting for the entire interview.”
Apparently he made a good impression. Microsoft invited him to Seattle for a summer internship as a systems engineer for Windows Live Operations. He later was offered a job with the same team. His colleagues
include some of the brightest minds in the nation.
“I felt like I was definitely on par with those kids,” said Johnson, who talks of one day launching his own startup in artificial intelligence or human-computer interaction. “If you take your education seriously, there’s really no limit.”
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