Matthew Michelson

I received my BS in 2002. My favorite aspect of the department was the small size and openness. The professors were always accessible, and I never had trouble getting classes I wanted, even as a chronic schedule changer. Even though JHU is a research institution, it never felt like the research was more important than the undergraduates. In fact, I got to know a couple of professors pretty well. This allowed me opportunities such as helping TA a few classes and getting sponsored for an independent programming project in CS education.

Currently I am a graduate student at USC and I constantly pull on the skills I learned as an undergraduate. With regard to research, two important but underemphasized skills are math and writing. Fortunately, because of the department's requirements I am well trained in both. Beyond practical skills, however, I contribute most of my graduate school success to the confidence I gained from completing the rigorous course work at JHU. Now, when faced with similar challenges, I am not intimidated having faced them before.

John Stoneham

 When I left high school I had equal interest in computers and music as career choices. I came to Hopkins because it's affiliated with Peabody Conservatory - I could do both and choose later. I took music courses at Peabody every semester I was at Hopkins, and directed an a cappella group (the Johns Hopkins Mental Notes) for four years - the joy of my time at Hopkins. I spent a fifth year finishing a Master's in CS and graduated with a BA in Computer Science & Music and an MSE in CS. Overall I couldn't have asked for a better situation to pursue both my major interests.

During school I had a long-standing internship at eOriginal, Inc. and two shorter ones at Northrop Grumman. Since graduation I've been working for Northrop Grumman in the defense industry (and pursuing music in the community). I've worked on the software behind the radars for the F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter airplanes, internal R&D projects, and several classified projects. The theoretical knowledge and experience in applying it that I received at Hopkins put me and my classmates several steps ahead of graduates I've met from other schools, and I think the Hopkins curricular approach is an excellent stepping stone to either industry or academia.

Jay Crim

 I grew up in southern California, but decided I needed a change of scenery for college, so it was off to the east coast - and Hopkins! After trying out a few different majors, I eventually settled on math, but this didn't stop me from taking quite a few computer science courses as well, and eventually minoring in CS.

A couple of the most interesting classes I took at JHU were Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. Professors David Yarowsky and Jason Eisner challenged us to build working systems, so by the end of college I had written a program with my roommate that answered natural language questions about movies and actors using IMDB data. This was one of the hardest projects I worked on in college, but was also one of the most rewarding when we saw the final system working.

The knowledge of computer science that I gained at Hopkins has remained relevant since my graduation, and I often use the data structures and algorithms I first learned about at JHU (as well as the problem solving skills that the math and computer science courses helped me to develop) in my day-to-day work as a software engineer at Google.

Of course, life at Hopkins isn't about just computer science. I met some of my best friends and was able to travel up and down the east coast of the US for tournaments while playing on the Ultimate Frisbee team. Thanks to a grant from the JHU Center for Educational Resources, I spent 6 weeks driving across the country on Route 66 while collecting oral histories about the historic highway. And I spent countless late nights at the office of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, where I learned a ton not only about writing and editing, but also about business, ethics, leadership and meeting deadlines.