When I was at the University of Maryland in the late 70s, we had a student chapter of the ACM that met regularly. Once a year (or semester, I forget) we had "Ca

When I was at the University of Maryland in the late 70s, we had a student chapter of the ACM that met regularly. Once a year (or semester, I forget) we had "Career Night" when local IT companies would do a presentation of what they had to offer to future comp. sci. grads. We always had a good turn out for Career Night since the vendors provided the refreshments, which were orders of magnitude better that what we had at a regular meeting. NSA was always one of the presenters, and it was an amusing talk because they couldn't really tell us anything about what we'd be doing. They just said they had interesting problems, pretty much any hardware you could name, and decent salaries and benefits. I don't think any of my friends ended up working for them, but I have known quite a few NSA employees over the years. A friend who worked as a Russian language specialist had little good to say about the IT system they had to use. I imagine the cryptanalysts were the ones with the really good systems.