referentia open house

this afternoon my company hosted 28 students from the UH Department of Information and Computer Science, College of Engineering and IEEE student chapter.

i gathered a bunch of my engineers to help me with the presentation. its like we are pro presenters already. we know exactly what we want to talk about and how we want to deliver our message. each time we do this it gets better and better. this presentation went really well. i'm really proud of our engineers for stepping up and contributing to efforts like this.



so, what did we talk about? i'll give you a quick summary.

referentia has awesome projects.
we talked about three of our coolest projects. we talked technical and we even gave a demo. the key thing here was that the enthusiasm about the projects really showed in the engineers presentations. our projects are cool. we are doing innovative stuff. it does matter. it is awesome. and it showed.

referentia has awesome people.
one of the points that we really wanted to show was that our employees are really cool. coming to work is fun. our lunch conversations are awesome. we all get a long and really makes a difference. austen mentioned its like we are all in college together struggling through classes trying to make it. it actually does kind of feels like that. we definitely have a bond that isn't normal work stuff. better yet, we have really smart people at referetia. bonus points!

advice to students
we always jump at any opportunity to tell students what we think. and we definitely went into this presentation with a goal. our goal was to shock the students a little. here is a summary of what we said:

we hire top notch students. the students we hire do more than just school work. they work on real projects. projects that give them an edge over their peers.

you are competing for jobs. you better separate yourself from your peers.

you need to know what kind of jobs are out there. start using your opportunities in school to reach your goal.

i don't care if you don't know java. we can teach you that. but i require that you are driven, determined, and communicate well. if you can't work in a team setting, then i can't you won't do well in our environment.


for the record
none of the students use netbeans!