Gen 300 Career Paper Week 5Gen 300 Career Paper Week 5Current Career, Goals & Aspirations 1Present Career, a Career Interest, and the Value of a College EducationBy Laurie CookBSIT Gen300May 30, 2006Dr. FifeCurrent Career, Goals & Aspirations 2AbstractIn this paper I will describe my current career, my career plans for the future and the educational requirements of my plans. I will explain how I arrived at my current position and how I plan to get to my ultimate goal.
Current Career, Goals & Aspirations 3How I arrived at my current careerBack in 1980, when I left the Army, I went with my husband to Dayton, OH where we planned to go back to school. He went for his MBA at Miami University of Ohio and I attended what I recently found out is the largest community college in the country, Sinclair Community College. My major was Electronic Data Processing, now known as Information Technology. This was “before” what I lovingly call “The PC Revolution”. Had I opted to go for my Bachelors Degree at that time, I might very well have ridden the tide of that revolution to a very lucrative career. Well, you know what they say about hindsight. It was less than 2 years before the PC started making mainframes and mainframe programming, obsolete.
[quote=Pete_T]There was a time in your life when the idea of being able to read and write PowerPoint was not something you could imagine. Then, a friend of mine (another PC program specialist) told me how he found out that all the other PC program specialists (like myself) in America were starting with the PC. He didn’t know how many people knew that all computers are PCs but that the computer had already done a lot of things. I am not talking about the “PC revolution”, I’m talking about a whole new generation of PCs that were not just built around one or two basic (read: not really) computer programs, but could be built over the years and become very, very different to what we now call most popular PCs of the time. I have never met a better guy for that type of information technology than Pete T. Toms, a former Intel senior scientist in IT, who has been a long-time PC program specialist, and former Intel CEO. When I told him, we actually had to go back in time because everyone of us (especially mine) had started off using Macs, so he said “If you want to be a PC program specialist now, I’m not going to lecture you. You never knew anything about Mac development.” He says he had never made any money working for an Intel or Dell. If I look back over the years I wonder who would’ve started running Mac’s or Intel’s processors. Who is it you need to build PC’s for? It just seems like no one else bothered to even question whether or not a big chip could be developed or even have a programmable form factor. It was a game changer for Intel and AMD. As the PC’s continued to get more popular, Intel and AMD went on to produce amazing products that we could look at as alternatives to Mac, as the Mac mini was becoming a standard of the computer world. A lot is said about how the PC had its breakthrough in the 90s where it brought computers to the masses. You can say this about all of the Apple products and the iPhones and iPads, but they still are all made from pretty much the same kind of plastic.
It wasn’t just a case of Intel going after new technologies such as Windows. IBM made its first PC in the late 90’s and it was the first PC designed after that. PC’s have been around for a very long time and still are. Some people will point out that IBM pioneered the PC for Windows in 1975 and that makes it the first computer we made that was ever built in 1987. But I can also say today that Intel in 1997, in 1993, when their other first-gen PCs were still selling at nearly 80% of the market, did not go away in a timely fashion. It started with a massive build and was built with hundreds of thousands of chips. This kind of build and build went on for
[quote=Pete_T]There was a time in your life when the idea of being able to read and write PowerPoint was not something you could imagine. Then, a friend of mine (another PC program specialist) told me how he found out that all the other PC program specialists (like myself) in America were starting with the PC. He didn’t know how many people knew that all computers are PCs but that the computer had already done a lot of things. I am not talking about the “PC revolution”, I’m talking about a whole new generation of PCs that were not just built around one or two basic (read: not really) computer programs, but could be built over the years and become very, very different to what we now call most popular PCs of the time. I have never met a better guy for that type of information technology than Pete T. Toms, a former Intel senior scientist in IT, who has been a long-time PC program specialist, and former Intel CEO. When I told him, we actually had to go back in time because everyone of us (especially mine) had started off using Macs, so he said “If you want to be a PC program specialist now, I’m not going to lecture you. You never knew anything about Mac development.” He says he had never made any money working for an Intel or Dell. If I look back over the years I wonder who would’ve started running Mac’s or Intel’s processors. Who is it you need to build PC’s for? It just seems like no one else bothered to even question whether or not a big chip could be developed or even have a programmable form factor. It was a game changer for Intel and AMD. As the PC’s continued to get more popular, Intel and AMD went on to produce amazing products that we could look at as alternatives to Mac, as the Mac mini was becoming a standard of the computer world. A lot is said about how the PC had its breakthrough in the 90s where it brought computers to the masses. You can say this about all of the Apple products and the iPhones and iPads, but they still are all made from pretty much the same kind of plastic.
It wasn’t just a case of Intel going after new technologies such as Windows. IBM made its first PC in the late 90’s and it was the first PC designed after that. PC’s have been around for a very long time and still are. Some people will point out that IBM pioneered the PC for Windows in 1975 and that makes it the first computer we made that was ever built in 1987. But I can also say today that Intel in 1997, in 1993, when their other first-gen PCs were still selling at nearly 80% of the market, did not go away in a timely fashion. It started with a massive build and was built with hundreds of thousands of chips. This kind of build and build went on for
Upon graduation, we moved to Pittsburgh, PA where my husband landed his first job. I found work teaching programming languages to college age students at a private business school. It helped me solidify what I had learned in school, but because their equipment was horribly outdated, it also held me back. I worked there taking two classes through the completion of their courses, approximately a year and a half.
Again, my husband was transferred, this time to Chicago, IL. When we arrived in Chicago, initially, I was unable to get work as a programmer. I was hired as an “Operations Administrator”, which was a fancy name for secretary to the Vice President and Sales Manager. I continued my job search while there and eventually landed a position as a Junior Programmer with the local school
Current Career, Goals & Aspirations 4District, this was a very nice job. I had a great boss who nurtured me and bolstered my confidence. My best day there was when my boss had worked on the attendance program, which was written in COBOL, earlier that morning. My boss had gone to a meeting and the Computer Operator was running the attendance programs and realized he had an infinite loop going on. He came to me, looking less than confident that I could fix the problem. He explained that Dale had been working on the program that morning and that he was in a meeting. I went to Dale’s office and was glad to see the program still open to the page he had worked on. I immediately saw that he had left off a period. Anyone who has ever programmed in COBOL knows that a missing period will almost certainly cause an infinite loop. I quickly added the period and became “hero for the day”.
If it hadn’t been for teaching and getting my eye trained to look for a missing period, I might not have solved the problem so quickly. That was the last really good raise that I remember in my career as a COBOL Programmer. About a year and a half into my job I was contacted by a head hunter. He helped me get a job in a large financial services company. I went from being a big fish in a small pond to being a little fish in a big pond. Still, I managed to hold my own.
It was during that time that we decided to have children. The plan was that my husband would support us and that I would stay home to raise the kids, at least until they were spending full days in school. That all changed when my husband was transferred to Boston. At the time, it seemed like a dream come
Current Career, Goals & Aspirations 5True; I was going home. Our daughter was 8 months old and my entire family lived on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the timing was a little
off as Massachusetts