Just for grins, what did your “ratio” turn out to be?
Wow – that was a pretty uncool thing to say.
The person that posted a rude reply, in response to what he thought was spam given how little information you presented in your post, has indicated to us that he’s apologized to you and is regretful of his tone.
My unsolicited advice is that you take consideration of your own tone. People do not typically keep their first professional job for substantially more than a year and this bridge is on fire.
WOW! And congratulations! That was amazingly quick considering your tone of distress a few weeks ago. So what “clicked?” What advice would you give for the other job seekers?
I applied to 13 places (all places I really wanted to work), was interviewed by 5, had offers from 3. 1 company reneged on their offer for economic reasons, the other offer was laughable. The final one was perfect, great pay, great benefits, great work atmosphere, great area.
I’ll share some advice, that I think allowed for me to have a greater ‘ratio’ than you all described.
Try to dominate the interview, ask important questions, exude confidence, and most importantly be yourself.
Talk of your achievements with pride, don’t ever downplay yourself.
Look at the faces of the non-management employees, and see if they are happy - it’s likely that if they are all downtrodden… you will be too.
There is one bad thing IMO that FIRST cultivates in its students, and that is that everybody is a winner and that success is realized just by attempt. This is so not true in the real world, that type of philosophy in an interview is going to lead you out the door. Don’t go into these interviews thinking they will just know you, you have very little time to describe yourself. Most of what they will take from you is not what you say, but how you say it.
CD should consider a more formal job board like JaneYoung has suggested. I came here and posted as if it was one, and was met with great hostility. This would be a wonderful place for employers to meet potential hires.
Congrats on your job.
You and I have very different definitions of “great hostility”.
Nice way to win friends and influence people
Success in FIRST is not realized by the attempt. Success in FIRST is realized by hard work.
Attempting to build a robot has never won any type of success. Learning what you need to do to accomplish the objective and **working hard **towards that objective can yield success (just as in the real world).
If you believe that just attempting to compete is success, then you’ve missed some of the point of FIRST. As yoda said “do or do not, there is no try”
Maybe you should take some of your own advice?
The above, as always, is JMHO
This is somewhat off-topic, but I’m wondering, have the rest of you found this to be true? Does getting less than a 3.0 indicate you’re “not up to snuff?”
When I was an EE major in the 1980’s, I took quite a few classes where the median was set at the dividing point between C and D. In several classes, it was announced on the first day of class, “In this class, 50% of you will not pass. That’s mandated by the department, and it’s a promise.” I was told that one reason for the 50% attrition requirement was that 500 freshmen had declared themselves as EE majors, but there was only enough lab space for 240 students annually for upper-level lab courses. By the time I was a junior, most classes had a median set at a more sane level, typically at the dividing point between B and C. But that still meant that half the people earned C’s or below, so a 3.0 GPA was not that easy to maintain. The school I attended is large and well-known (it’s ranked by US News & World Report in the top 10 in engineering among national universities), so it’s not “some weird school no one goes to.” While I’m not particularly gifted as an engineer, I worked pretty hard – typically 70+ hours/week on classes. Some of my more talented classmates bemoaned the fact that they were also working 70 - 80 hours/week and earning even worse grades that I was. I seem to recall that the department-wide GPA for undergrads was reported at 2.4. The consolation was “if you can just graduate from here, you can write your own ticket” and it’s true that after graduation, many students with grades in the 2.2 - 2.5 range seemed to get decent offers.
Have grading standards changed in the last 25-30 years? The reason why “typical grades” concern me is that my son is applying to schools where some of the merit-based scholarships require maintaining a 3.0 GPA. As a freshman at the aforementioned school, this would have been very difficult to do. In fact, maintaining a 3.0 in that environment might almost be an unrealistic burden to place on a student.
I’m wondering if my experience was an atypical “blip” at a strange time in the history of a school with poor lab facilities. Or is it true that standards and expectations in engineering courses are still much higher than in other disciplines?
ABET may have something to do with that: There was something big that happened in 1980.
http://www.abet.org/history.shtml
Our 3.0 policy is because part of the new hire process requires that you et your MS at night and most schools require a 3.0 to get your MS.
I can speak for earlier times, but I grauated from Purdue in 2001. By that time about 50% of employers I looked into wanted a 3.0 or higher explicitly. A couple even wanted a 3.5 or higher (but those were rare and mostly for research firms).
As far as the 3.0 thing goes, it just keeps a lot more doors open. I had friends with 2.5 GPA that still got nice jobs, but I also know that they got turned down on the spot for many jobs they wanted.
Purdue is a really good engineering school. Often top 10 depending on the degree. I have heard of that grades don’t matter if you went to a certain school, but I have only heard this referenced to Ivy League and MIT.
P.S. At Purdue there were several courses that believe in extremely tough exams i.e. median scores of 30%. Typically though these scores were normalized so that the median grade was around a 3.0.
My hiring story (circa 1994): I got my first position out of school at a great company, doing work I enjoyed, mostly because I knew someone (a professor) who knew someone (an earlier graduate of his) who worked for someone (the earlier graduate’s boss) who was getting ready to hire a couple of fresh-outs, after several years of hiring freezes. The professor recommended me because a) he knew me, via class contact and engineering related extra-curricular activities and b) believed that I would reflect well on him and the school. I also had good enough grades (around 3.4-ish as an undergrad, and about the same in grad school) to pass the sniff test. There were a couple of rounds of interviews, and they actually offered me my choice of two jobs. My boss eventually told me that the main reason he made me an offer was because I apparently interviewed very well, and exhibited both technical knowledge and self-confidence [blush]. No mention of GPA. Your mileage may vary.
My point is that it isn’t necessary to go to an ivy-league or well-known school, or have a perfect GPA to build a career that you really enjoy. Your GPA only has to be good enough not to hold you back. I think for most highly-motivated folks that translates to about a 3.2 GPA today. A fantastic GPA alone won’t result in your success after school ends. Active participation in FIRST helps, no question.