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Ask HN: Would you hire me out of college? Willing to live in the office

7 points by syberslidder ↗ HN
My goal after I graduate in a year is to work for a start up, preferably one in Silicon Valley. Before I ask you if a start up would hire a college graduate, let me tell me a bit about myself and you can judge for yourself if I am worthy.

I am current pursuing my degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in math. I have a 4.0 GPA(all around), 2 (soon 3) years of research in DNA matching and parallel programming for protein folding. I just finished working for a local start up for about 7 months (while doing a 7 class work load), I did the entire back end (code, server setup, server/db admin, etc...). I am interning with Intel this summer. My senior year I will be doing research in porting MPI to a new architecture we are exploring at my university.

I know all the usual languages a college kid would know (C/C++, Python, php5, mysql, shell scripting).

I am teaching myself Erlang and plan on learning Scala/Clojure next. I am already familiar with Nvidia CUDA, and understand which way technology is going. And yes I know the difference between concurrency and parallelism :)

I constantly read about start ups, and I am willing to work very hard for whomever hires me out of college. I know start ups require a high capability/person ratio, and I am ready to bring it.

I also read a ton of books on software development, practices, and all that good stuff. I constantly try to improve myself and I am an incredibly hard worker, motivated by success.

I recently started a blog, it is not done yet, but the purpose of it is to have a sort of online resume. Feel free to check it out, and contact me to book me before graduation :P

www.khawajakorp.com

10 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] thread
joncalhoun
Do you know what sort of startup you would want to work at? I am guessing you will want to find a startup working on a problem that you are passionate about so some info about what you want to work on would be useful.
ssylee
With your profile, I think you would fit what Matterport is looking for: http://matterport.com/jobs.html

I don't know how well you code, but from your description, you're a very bright kid. Talk to them to inquire about opportunities.

One final tip: if you've gotten some time, try to spend some time and money doing work at coffee shops, if you're visiting the Silicon Valley. Try to attend valuable conferences as well (it's much easier for students to get freebie entrances, or at massive discounts). You could gain a lot of relevant network that would help you down the road.

syberslidder
The start ups that really interest me are those that are catering to the tech world in general, for example, medera cloud (spelling?) that came out the other day, or something like heroku, I really want to build things that are HUGE and scale really well.
jerickson
If you want to work on scale I've got a job for you.

email me: Jerickson@yammer-inc.com

syberslidder
Do you guys think I am on track with the technologies I am teaching myself? Also since I do not graduate for a year from now, when do you think is an optimal time to try to make contact? I am looking for a way to get in contact with as many startups as possible
kirchhoff
"whomever hires me"

should be

"whoever hires me"

zxcvvcxz
Out of curiosity what school did you attend? A 7-course workload and that GPA is ridiculously good.
syberslidder
I currently attend the University of South Carolina/their honors college, which was just voted #1 public honors college in the nation, and yes we rock football
syberslidder
and that 7 hours is my semesterly average over the past 6 semesters, not a one time thing :)
willpower101
I don't know a single Cs Graduate at my state school with those kind of credentials. My questions is who _wouldn't_ hire him, lol.