Author's story

I write embedded software for a large aerospace hardware company. This page is a short note on where the advice on the other pages comes from, so you can judge how far to trust it.

Where the advice comes from

I began in computer science and moved to electrical engineering in my second year. Circuits and digital logic made me prefer hardware, and summer classes taken earlier meant the switch cost no extra year. Before and during school I held jobs that had nothing to do with engineering, from customer service to grading calculus. They taught me to explain a design to people who did not share my vocabulary.

A six-month design co-op on residential buildings did not fit. It showed me which roles to leave alone, and it left me with bullets that had numbers in them. The internship right after it, on real-time signal processing in C++, did fit. It pointed me at embedded software, where low-level code meets the physical side of the degree.

I spent the first semester of senior year sending hundreds of applications by hand, and I found most of the roles on LinkedIn. My early resumes were weak until I rebuilt them on a better template. The resume page has those fixes. Nobody at the company that hired me could refer me, so I sent a cold application the same day the opening appeared. The section on getting a referral first covers the better route.

Two lessons from that search show up across these pages. The rule of 20 is a rule of thumb, not a measured cutoff. After about 20 applications with zero interviews, pause and reevaluate the resume, the channel, and the roles you target. The section on when online applications go quiet puts it to work. The second lesson is that an unfinished project still counts when the progress is real. An unfinished solar tracker was part of what got me that internship, and the projects page covers how to present one.

One more habit is worth keeping: never bluff in an interview. The how to interview page follows the process step by step.