8 ms·

I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

25 points by GlennCSmith 12y ago

GlennCSmith 12y ago
Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
- gradschool 12y ago
  Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me. Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
- lbotos 12y ago
  I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  To pass any decent CS course you need to at least be able to program, but outside of maybe a few group projects the programs that you write won't be very large so you don't have to be an expert in TDD, version control or any frameworks. In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects. Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
- wvenable 12y ago
  I went to a good school for computing science and I know I graduated with a few people who couldn't program. They had no intention of programming in their career which is good because in 4th year they were producing awful spaghetti code.
throwaway283719 12y ago
You might get the impression that the author studied engineering ("I studied engineering, not English...") or perhaps computer science ("...graduated at the top of my class in computer science...") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light on technical skills and heavy on jargon and buzzwords. [0] http://www.smeal.psu.edu/scis/mis-undergrad http://www.smeal.psu.edu/scis/mis-undergrad
- cafard 12y ago
  Thank you. I found his post baffling for that reason.
- disdev 12y ago
  I have an MIS degree, and generally, you're correct. They're light on technology, though I did learn some basics. I already knew a lot of that already, though... what I learned the most from were the Accounting, Marketing, and Business Management classes I took.
- mason240 12y ago
  The first paragraph says it all: >According to Alan Morrison of PwC, "The new analytics is the art and science of turning the invisible into to visible...It's about detecting opportunities and threats you hadn't anticipated, or finding people you didn't know existed who could be your next customers. It's about learning what's really important, rather than what you thought was important. It's about identifying, committing, and following through on what your enterprise must change most."
- tseabrooks 12y ago
  I didn't verify that he had an MIS degree... but MIS is definitely not the same thing as Computer Science or Engineering. If this is true it's a fairly disingenuous and manipulative article.
- angersock 12y ago
  MIS programs are glorified IT training--which is fine, if you're good at what you do. University of Houston runs a decent degree program in MIS, and they can place graduates. Had the author wanted us to actually feel bad for them, maybe they should've linked a github.
kyllo 12y ago
"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The problem highlighted by the article seems to be that companies are no longer so interested in hiring raw material and then providing training in angular.js or whatever but expect to hire people who already have those skills. Anecdotally, I'd say that of my CS class maybe only 5% did any serious programming work outside of class.
  - KrisAndrew 12y ago
    All of programming can be self-taught. The problem with finding people who have "skills" already is that they might only be able to use libraries and frameworks to build things, but they can't really solve problems. Can they figure out the solution to a memory management problem when throwing hardware at it isn't an option? Writing an application that doesn't fall down is par for the course these days. So knowing how to use some tools doesn't cut it. The companies hiring these candidates are digging themselves a hole, or they are just satisfied with having shallow technical requirements. (I've rarely programmed outside of class/work since college. I've never had a problem getting a job. I just don't like sitting in front of a computer all the time.)
- nmjohn 12y ago
  You articulated perfectly exactly what I was thinking. I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false. It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end. > Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career. Bingo.
magice 12y ago
Yet-another-whining-about-college-education. Frankly, this is the most appropriate place to scream, "get a job, man." I never understanding these complains about how bad college education is. We talking about America here, the land of individualism, of self-interest, of self-discovery. It seems like everyone expects 5-year-old kids to pace their studies. Yet, funnily, if it's college, the professors have to decide what the students need for "real world." What gives? So elementary pupils know what they need to learn, but college students (aka 18+) do not? On a closely related note: half of all technology workers have no formal education, the article said. Wait, if those workers can learn by themselves, can't our precious, innocent, poorly taught college students get off their behinds and study those, too? Rather than whining about how their professors are not familiar with, you know, "real-world" experience, why not focus on what they are familiar with? Can you go out to a real world and expect those to know the greatest and latest algorithms and languages and formal definitions, their pros and cons and applications? Or how, says, Windows applications and AJAX applications are similar and different. Or a thousands of those long-term researches that businesses just can't afford to do. No. That's why we need professors and researchers. Geez. Get a job, will ya?
squidmccactus 12y ago
Silly engineer, English is just another name for "Pre-Law".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
kator 12y ago
> 47 percent of the technology jobs in New York City no longer require any college education at all. I've done a lot of hiring over the years and recently in NYC. I can say in general I've always hired for Attitude and Aptitude. I can teach you anything if you have the right Attitude. I can't teach you to have a good Attitude and I can't make you have a better Aptitude. One very real challenge in NYC is that big players are soaking up most of tech talent and there is a ground war between financial technology companies and other start-ups. That pressure has caused companies to go back to the drawing board on how they qualify candidates. For a while recruiters wouldn’t even look at a person without seeing some lofty education background in a resume. Now they’re looking for the scrappy problem solver that might be savvy based on their recent work experience. I find this interesting because when I started in technology 30 years ago I had a hard time hiring for my companies and developed this “Attitude+Aptitude” concept with my teams. Over time it seemed like it was getting harder for people to get into technology jobs because it became accepted principle that you had to hire people with CS degrees to ensure success. Of course that was BS when it happened and I’ve always fought against it over the years. One of the best things for me about hiring in NYC was being able to tell the recruiting team what I was looking for and to tell them to stop looking for just CS degrees. Recently I took a position as CTO in a San Francisco HQ’d start-up. I’ve been talking to my engineering team on how we filter candidates, again I’m preaching A+A but its clear they’ve been taught to look for CS degrees and Math majors. I’m working with them to broaden their thinking. I think this is an example that in general people are lazy about hiring and they’ll use anything they can as an excuse to not invest in finding out if a candidate is the right person. It’s tough, we’re all busy and have yet another meeting to run to or another customer call to deal with. It’s easy to think hiring is a pain and distraction from what you’re doing today. But, let’s be clear, the single most important thing you can do is scale your teams and if you don’t hire they’ll never scale and you’ll fail. To me the most important thing you can do in a company is hire well. The second most important thing is fire well, let people go if they’re not working out. You’re not doing them any favors and in the end their life will be better if they can find a place they fit in and can be successful and your world will be more successful if you focus on building a team that is a well oiled machine that smashes through problems like a hot knife through butter.
felipellrocha 12y ago
"To find real work, I had to teach myself new technologies and skills outside of class, and it wasn’t easy." What the hell was this guy expecting? "Hey, guys! I just graduated! Let the money river flow!"?
dontbeabitch 12y ago
go flip burgers
cowsandmilk 12y ago
Author claims to have studied engineering, but seems to be absolutely unaware of co-op programs which almost all engineering schools have. Some, like Northeastern University, even require you to do a co-op[1]. I've worked with Northeastern students at pharma companies and they dive into the belly of the beast when they they spend six months at a company. Often, they become so integral, they get hired after they graduate to keep doing what they did during their co-op. Or an alternative model, going back to 1916, is MIT's Practice school[2], where graduate students go into factories and apply their training on specific projects. This reads largely like someone who is ignorant of the opportunities that were probably present at Penn State, assuming that a degree would just get him a job. [1] http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ [2] http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/ http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/
comrh 12y ago
I studied English and not engineering and had no problem finding a job in NYC as a programmer.
notjustanymike 12y ago
Maybe he should have picked a better major. No one takes an MIS degree seriously.
- taternuts 12y ago
  I don't think that's true. Obviously the person with a CS degree will be hired over the person with the MIS degree all other things being equal, but it's up to the candidate to spend time to create a portfolio or something that shows they know what they are doing and can code. If you're too lazy to do the CS route and plan to go MIS then get a programming job, then you have to be un-lazy in your free time to make up for it.
buckbova 12y ago
I finished my bachelors in CS at a state school while working in an unrelated field. I couldn't get a job programming a VCR out of school. My school was not prestigious. I had no idea how to interview. This was over a decade ago now. I got a job working telephone tech support for a networking company, hardly worth my time. Nearly two years later i got a job as a data analyst through a friend of a friend, working in SQL server and writing VB6 apps. I should have spent some time researching and contacting companies while I was a junior and senior in college. I figured, like the OP, champagne would rain down from the heavens when I left school. It did not. But there is hope. Keep plodding forward. What I learned in college has helped me through the years and it does still look good on the resume.
Glyptodon 12y ago
Idiot MIS major is 'CEO' of his own company but can't find a job... And then writes an article where he pretends to be an Engineering/CS major. I feel like the Washington Post ought to be embarrassed to have printed this.
tom_scrace 12y ago
He says he studied engineering. But he didn't. He studied computer science. And therein lies the root of his confusion.
j_s 12y ago
It is unfortunate that this article gets featured when the author is obviously blowing smoke; it would be great to hear from someone actually in this boat. The comments there pointed out another article by the same author last year, explaining how he turned down multiple jobs to start his own web design company: http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_and_more_college_grads_are_tossing_aside_their_resumes_and_embracing_entrepreneur.html http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_a...
Balgair 12y ago
"...a 2006 study of college professors in STEM fields showed that a whopping 59.8 percent hadn’t had any job experience in their industry. That means that a large portion of the professors tasked with teaching college grads how to become marketers, managers and salespeople have never marketed anything, managed anyone or sold anything at all." Come on HN, you guys missed this cherry? I do like that you dug through the 22 year old's Linkedin profile to get his real degree, but yall missed a pretty big logical flaw there. That said, there is a lot to analyze about the poor kid. First, he thinks that spending a year unemployed is abnormal. Granted the guy was in State College for a long time, and that is a pocket universe filled with football, cheap beer and cheaper dates. He's been sheltered with the Penn State pride and now is finally realizing that you gotta kiss a lot more ass than what he is used to in order to make it through an interview. Second, he's at least misleading readers to his actual degree (as yall sought out online) and he thinks thats ok to do on a national level. A simple google search is going to ruin this guy. But as a voting, draft-eligible citizen, he's allowed to pave his own path. Third, he's naive at best, ignorant at worst. Honestly, he seems harmless, and that is not going to cut it for the guy now that he dug this grave. He's got to get some beating in here before he realizes that he is the only one that will straighten his own back. Best wishes to the poor guy. As John Wayne said: Life is hard, but its a lot harder when you're stupid.

25 points by GlennCSmith 12y ago

Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!

gradschool 12y ago
Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me. Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
lbotos 12y ago
I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
jiggy2011 12y ago
To pass any decent CS course you need to at least be able to program, but outside of maybe a few group projects the programs that you write won't be very large so you don't have to be an expert in TDD, version control or any frameworks. In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects. Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
wvenable 12y ago
I went to a good school for computing science and I know I graduated with a few people who couldn't program. They had no intention of programming in their career which is good because in 4th year they were producing awful spaghetti code.

throwaway283719 12y ago

You might get the impression that the author studied engineering ("I studied engineering, not English...") or perhaps computer science ("...graduated at the top of my class in computer science...") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light on technical skills and heavy on jargon and buzzwords. [0] http://www.smeal.psu.edu/scis/mis-undergrad http://www.smeal.psu.edu/scis/mis-undergrad

cafard 12y ago
Thank you. I found his post baffling for that reason.
disdev 12y ago
I have an MIS degree, and generally, you're correct. They're light on technology, though I did learn some basics. I already knew a lot of that already, though... what I learned the most from were the Accounting, Marketing, and Business Management classes I took.
mason240 12y ago
The first paragraph says it all: >According to Alan Morrison of PwC, "The new analytics is the art and science of turning the invisible into to visible...It's about detecting opportunities and threats you hadn't anticipated, or finding people you didn't know existed who could be your next customers. It's about learning what's really important, rather than what you thought was important. It's about identifying, committing, and following through on what your enterprise must change most."
tseabrooks 12y ago
I didn't verify that he had an MIS degree... but MIS is definitely not the same thing as Computer Science or Engineering. If this is true it's a fairly disingenuous and manipulative article.
angersock 12y ago
MIS programs are glorified IT training--which is fine, if you're good at what you do. University of Houston runs a decent degree program in MIS, and they can place graduates. Had the author wanted us to actually feel bad for them, maybe they should've linked a github.

kyllo 12y ago

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.

jiggy2011 12y ago
The problem highlighted by the article seems to be that companies are no longer so interested in hiring raw material and then providing training in angular.js or whatever but expect to hire people who already have those skills. Anecdotally, I'd say that of my CS class maybe only 5% did any serious programming work outside of class.
- KrisAndrew 12y ago
  All of programming can be self-taught. The problem with finding people who have "skills" already is that they might only be able to use libraries and frameworks to build things, but they can't really solve problems. Can they figure out the solution to a memory management problem when throwing hardware at it isn't an option? Writing an application that doesn't fall down is par for the course these days. So knowing how to use some tools doesn't cut it. The companies hiring these candidates are digging themselves a hole, or they are just satisfied with having shallow technical requirements. (I've rarely programmed outside of class/work since college. I've never had a problem getting a job. I just don't like sitting in front of a computer all the time.)
nmjohn 12y ago
You articulated perfectly exactly what I was thinking. I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false. It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end. > Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career. Bingo.

magice 12y ago

Yet-another-whining-about-college-education. Frankly, this is the most appropriate place to scream, "get a job, man." I never understanding these complains about how bad college education is. We talking about America here, the land of individualism, of self-interest, of self-discovery. It seems like everyone expects 5-year-old kids to pace their studies. Yet, funnily, if it's college, the professors have to decide what the students need for "real world." What gives? So elementary pupils know what they need to learn, but college students (aka 18+) do not? On a closely related note: half of all technology workers have no formal education, the article said. Wait, if those workers can learn by themselves, can't our precious, innocent, poorly taught college students get off their behinds and study those, too? Rather than whining about how their professors are not familiar with, you know, "real-world" experience, why not focus on what they are familiar with? Can you go out to a real world and expect those to know the greatest and latest algorithms and languages and formal definitions, their pros and cons and applications? Or how, says, Windows applications and AJAX applications are similar and different. Or a thousands of those long-term researches that businesses just can't afford to do. No. That's why we need professors and researchers. Geez. Get a job, will ya?

squidmccactus 12y ago

Silly engineer, English is just another name for "Pre-Law".

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

kator 12y ago

> 47 percent of the technology jobs in New York City no longer require any college education at all. I've done a lot of hiring over the years and recently in NYC. I can say in general I've always hired for Attitude and Aptitude. I can teach you anything if you have the right Attitude. I can't teach you to have a good Attitude and I can't make you have a better Aptitude. One very real challenge in NYC is that big players are soaking up most of tech talent and there is a ground war between financial technology companies and other start-ups. That pressure has caused companies to go back to the drawing board on how they qualify candidates. For a while recruiters wouldn’t even look at a person without seeing some lofty education background in a resume. Now they’re looking for the scrappy problem solver that might be savvy based on their recent work experience. I find this interesting because when I started in technology 30 years ago I had a hard time hiring for my companies and developed this “Attitude+Aptitude” concept with my teams. Over time it seemed like it was getting harder for people to get into technology jobs because it became accepted principle that you had to hire people with CS degrees to ensure success. Of course that was BS when it happened and I’ve always fought against it over the years. One of the best things for me about hiring in NYC was being able to tell the recruiting team what I was looking for and to tell them to stop looking for just CS degrees. Recently I took a position as CTO in a San Francisco HQ’d start-up. I’ve been talking to my engineering team on how we filter candidates, again I’m preaching A+A but its clear they’ve been taught to look for CS degrees and Math majors. I’m working with them to broaden their thinking. I think this is an example that in general people are lazy about hiring and they’ll use anything they can as an excuse to not invest in finding out if a candidate is the right person. It’s tough, we’re all busy and have yet another meeting to run to or another customer call to deal with. It’s easy to think hiring is a pain and distraction from what you’re doing today. But, let’s be clear, the single most important thing you can do is scale your teams and if you don’t hire they’ll never scale and you’ll fail. To me the most important thing you can do in a company is hire well. The second most important thing is fire well, let people go if they’re not working out. You’re not doing them any favors and in the end their life will be better if they can find a place they fit in and can be successful and your world will be more successful if you focus on building a team that is a well oiled machine that smashes through problems like a hot knife through butter.

felipellrocha 12y ago

"To find real work, I had to teach myself new technologies and skills outside of class, and it wasn’t easy." What the hell was this guy expecting? "Hey, guys! I just graduated! Let the money river flow!"?

dontbeabitch 12y ago

go flip burgers

cowsandmilk 12y ago

Author claims to have studied engineering, but seems to be absolutely unaware of co-op programs which almost all engineering schools have. Some, like Northeastern University, even require you to do a co-op[1]. I've worked with Northeastern students at pharma companies and they dive into the belly of the beast when they they spend six months at a company. Often, they become so integral, they get hired after they graduate to keep doing what they did during their co-op. Or an alternative model, going back to 1916, is MIT's Practice school[2], where graduate students go into factories and apply their training on specific projects. This reads largely like someone who is ignorant of the opportunities that were probably present at Penn State, assuming that a degree would just get him a job. [1] http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ [2] http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/ http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/

comrh 12y ago

I studied English and not engineering and had no problem finding a job in NYC as a programmer.

notjustanymike 12y ago

Maybe he should have picked a better major. No one takes an MIS degree seriously.

taternuts 12y ago
I don't think that's true. Obviously the person with a CS degree will be hired over the person with the MIS degree all other things being equal, but it's up to the candidate to spend time to create a portfolio or something that shows they know what they are doing and can code. If you're too lazy to do the CS route and plan to go MIS then get a programming job, then you have to be un-lazy in your free time to make up for it.

buckbova 12y ago

I finished my bachelors in CS at a state school while working in an unrelated field. I couldn't get a job programming a VCR out of school. My school was not prestigious. I had no idea how to interview. This was over a decade ago now. I got a job working telephone tech support for a networking company, hardly worth my time. Nearly two years later i got a job as a data analyst through a friend of a friend, working in SQL server and writing VB6 apps. I should have spent some time researching and contacting companies while I was a junior and senior in college. I figured, like the OP, champagne would rain down from the heavens when I left school. It did not. But there is hope. Keep plodding forward. What I learned in college has helped me through the years and it does still look good on the resume.

Glyptodon 12y ago

Idiot MIS major is 'CEO' of his own company but can't find a job... And then writes an article where he pretends to be an Engineering/CS major. I feel like the Washington Post ought to be embarrassed to have printed this.

tom_scrace 12y ago

He says he studied engineering. But he didn't. He studied computer science. And therein lies the root of his confusion.

j_s 12y ago

It is unfortunate that this article gets featured when the author is obviously blowing smoke; it would be great to hear from someone actually in this boat. The comments there pointed out another article by the same author last year, explaining how he turned down multiple jobs to start his own web design company: http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_and_more_college_grads_are_tossing_aside_their_resumes_and_embracing_entrepreneur.html http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_a...

Balgair 12y ago

"...a 2006 study of college professors in STEM fields showed that a whopping 59.8 percent hadn’t had any job experience in their industry. That means that a large portion of the professors tasked with teaching college grads how to become marketers, managers and salespeople have never marketed anything, managed anyone or sold anything at all." Come on HN, you guys missed this cherry? I do like that you dug through the 22 year old's Linkedin profile to get his real degree, but yall missed a pretty big logical flaw there. That said, there is a lot to analyze about the poor kid. First, he thinks that spending a year unemployed is abnormal. Granted the guy was in State College for a long time, and that is a pocket universe filled with football, cheap beer and cheaper dates. He's been sheltered with the Penn State pride and now is finally realizing that you gotta kiss a lot more ass than what he is used to in order to make it through an interview. Second, he's at least misleading readers to his actual degree (as yall sought out online) and he thinks thats ok to do on a national level. A simple google search is going to ruin this guy. But as a voting, draft-eligible citizen, he's allowed to pave his own path. Third, he's naive at best, ignorant at worst. Honestly, he seems harmless, and that is not going to cut it for the guy now that he dug this grave. He's got to get some beating in here before he realizes that he is the only one that will straighten his own back. Best wishes to the poor guy. As John Wayne said: Life is hard, but its a lot harder when you're stupid.