The workshop: What I’m looking for

Your presentation

The big picture

• I understand the “so what.”
• I see a specific “what” connected to the “so what.”

Time

• Your presentation runs at least 20 minutes.
• Your presentation runs no more than 25 minutes.

Mechanics

• Slides or code views are ready when called upon.
• Slides and/or code are readable from the back of the room.

The audience

• Audience members follow the presentation well enough to ask questions.
• You respond to questions gracefully.
• External panelists agree there is a “what” and a “so what.”

You as audience member

• You have a question for some presenter.
• Your questions don’t dominate the workshop.

Your final reflection

By 11:59pm on Thursday, May 11, you’ll write a short reflection on your experience. I’m looking for PDF of at most three pages. (The sweet spot is probably around two pages.)

To put yourself in the right frame of mind for making a short statement, I suggest you imagine yourself in a hiring situation. Perhaps a job fair or a course-preview event. Here are some scenarios you might imagine:

• What can I build? You’re at a job fair, and you meet an engineer who is recruiting for an interesting startup. They think they can gain competitive advantage with a custom-designed programming language, but they don’t have a budget like Google (Go), Facebook (Hack), Apple (Swift), or Mozilla (Rust). Which is good news, because it means they might want to hire you. You have at most five minutes to explain what you can build for them. Go!

  Hint: If it’s a company you really want to work for, the engineer is not likely to be impressed by a broad list of accomplishments, shallowly described. Your best tactic is to get a list out of the way quickly, then go deep on something that is really important: “I learned to do X, Y, and Z, plus some other things, but what was really important was A—let me tell you about it.”

• What are my skills? Same job fair, different recruiter. They want a flexible, self-starting software engineer—someone who can work at a high level of abstraction but who is not intimidated by bits, bytes, words, and pointers. You have five minutes to explain your portable skills. What skills have you developed or polished that could be applied to other projects, not just programming-language implementation?

  Hint: This scenario is deliberately different from the previous scenario; a litany of skills is more appropriate here. But if you want the job, you should still spend most of your time on one important skill, which you should develop in a little bit of depth.

• What do I understand? We offer both a master’s degree and a post-baccalaureate certificate (like an undergraduate minor) online. These programs need instructors for courses like 11, 15, 40, and 105, as well as various electives. We want to hire people who have some idea how programming languages work and who can explain to a student what happens after source code is handed to a compiler. Explain to the program director (Marty Allen) why you are one of those people.

These scenarios aren’t required; they are meant to provide structure to an otherwise open-ended prompt (“What have I learned?”). If you prefer some other way to argue that you’ve learned something of value, go for it.

Your statement should include one specific reference to work you turned in this semester, which would support your claim of having gained something of value. Example from my portion of the system: “you can see from my tokens.c file that I have mastered the techniques needed to be sure all allocated memory is eventually freed.”¹

When you think about preparing your statement, remember the reflection questions you have been answering every week all semester. They encapsulate a ton of information about what you have learned.

When I read your statement I’ll be looking for these elements:

• You make interesting claims. That is, your claims make you sound like somebody we would want in our organization.

• Your claims are plausibly related to work you did in the class.

• Something in your claims is supported by work you turned in during the semester.

When your statement is ready, get it to me via DM on Slack. The deadline is 11:59pm on May 11.