My company is starting up its college recruiting drive again this year so I’m helping out again. For some reason, we’re recruiting from a lot of East Coast universities and I ended up flying out to Rochester Institute of Technology.
We gave a presentation in their computer science building (which is pretty standard) and then crashed their computer science dorm to bring them pizza and fliers (which is unconventional) . The whole thing reminded me of why I take the time to do all this new-grad stuff in the first place.
I met some really bright kids. Bright, and excited, and ambitious and a little scared. Their enthusiasm was palpable and rubbed off somewhat on me.
Take their dorm for example. They’d commandeered a broom closet and turned it into an ad-hoc server room with dozens of servers. They’d built a network-enabled soda machine called “Big Drink” so they could buy soda from their dorm room, walk down the hall, and have it already dropped. They’d built two technologies they called “SOAP” and “SUDS”: one sensed if the showers were occupied or not and reported back through a web server and the other allowed them to set up from their room what music they wanted to hear in the shower, and when.
Oh, and Big Drink had a little cousin named Little Drink.