On Thursday November 20, 2008, the ICS department at UH Manoa saw presentations from seven computing firms that are based or have offices here in Honolulu. The seven companies Referentia, Oceanit, Camber, Ikayzo, DataHouse, Alion, and Concentris presented information about their respective companies. Six of the seven companies had projects with the government or military, Ikayzo's focus seems to be in social networking.
I thought all of the businesses did a fine job of presenting their organization's operations. Although, in my estimation, Referentia did the best job of focusing their presentation towards the students. Referentia's representative Aaron Ito, a former ICS student at UH Manoa pointed out what their current intern is working on along with how the company likes to develop its interns and employees. I hope the companies in attendance took note and make the same type of pitch as Referentia at next semester's Industry Day.
The most interesting tidbit I got from the presentations was the acceptance failure or I should say the tolerance of failing. These companies want to see how their interns deal with failure and in software engineering failure is as certain as death and taxes. I was amused by tools that Alion, Referentia, and DataHouse use in their software development: Ant, Junit, Subversion, etc. The same tools that are being used in Professor Johnson's software engineering class. I felt some comfort in knowing I will have the ability to work in the industry.
I was disappointed by the department's turnout, there is close to a thousand students in ICS yet less than fifty showed up. The only way to get more companies involved is if more students show up to events like Industry Day. Oh, by the way, I saw Professor Johnson in attendance where was the rest of the faculty? The representatives were throwing out a lot acronyms and intials: AWS, SQS, EXT JS, etc. stuff I have never heard before it would be nice to know about the tools before we get out into the working world.
I gave out two resumes one to Alion Science and one to Referentia the projects they were working on peaked my interest. The guys from Alion worked on Modeling and Simulation although they could not mention the client, my guess is its the military. Referentia had a cool project which displayed a 3-dimensional map of a battlefield, neat stuff. I really liked what Referentia had to offer, they seem to have an active interest in developing the skills of their interns by letting them work on real projects and pushing them into becoming solid candidates for the workforce.
I felt I got a lot information from the presentations at Industry Day and it was time well spent. I know tools the firms use for development and should not be afraid of not being able to do work. I got to hand out my resume to two companies that I would like to intern at and maybe work for in the future.
