Keith Smith provides recommendations for college students to be successful after graduation based on his experience. He recommends that students (1) gain relevant experience through internships and side projects, (2) develop technical skills especially in programming, and (3) get involved in extracurricular activities to stand out. Programming ability and hands-on experience with tools like Azure, AWS, and APIs are particularly important for careers in development, systems administration, security, and other IT roles.

1. Success After College
What should you do now to be successful when you graduate
(and for years to come)?
A.K.A. I wish I would have done {x} while I was at college.
During

2. Introduction
Keith Smith
• Graduated April 2014 – Information Technology
Information Assurance and Security with a Business Minor
• Worked at Microsoft as a Distributed Service Engineer on graduation.
• Currently work as Site Reliability Engineer managing the entire cloud infrastructure
at Imagine Learning.
Please connect with me on LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/keithbradsmith

3. Job Landscape

4. The Helpdesk GapCareerGrowth
Time
College Years
Land First Tech Job (Helpdesk / Computer Support Representative)
Off-Campus
Helpdesk / Tier 2
Internship(s)
Land First (Career) Job
(Sysadmin, etc…)
Promotion
Raise, Management
Etc…
Degree
Required

5. Job – Information Security “Intern”
What I learned:
1. Mentoring is pivotal to success.
2. I can do hard things.
What you should do now:
1. Find a mentor / organization.
2. Have faith in yourself. Be
confident. Look beyond the easy.

6. Job – Distributed Services Engineer
What I learned:
1. Wow I’m so dumb!
2. The best employees are highly
technical mini-Project Managers.
3. Make measurable impact.
What you should do now:
1. Be humble. Trust me… you can
always learn more.
2. Learn email/time/work
management. Set expectations. say
no.
3. Become an industry expert.

7. Impact
Work you do Leveraging the
work of others
Helping others
do their work

8. Measuring Impact
• Informing / Reporting
• Delivering Deep KPIs / Service Metrics
• Company SLAs
• Financial
• What is the dollar impact of every project?
• Architectural (Technical)
• Am I influencing the technical direction of my stewardship / company?

9. Industry Expertise
Create / Trail blaze
Consult
Coach
Advise
Apply
Learn

10. Job – Azure Systems Administrator
/ Site Reliability Engineer
What I learned:
1. Companies don’t always know
what they need.
2. Trust matters. It gives you
influence.
3. Programming elevates your IT
capabilities.
What you should do now:
1. Have a lot of experiences.
2. Fulfill your commitments.
3. Love a language.

11. Recommendations – UX Designer
UX Design:
A word of caution: Hard to get into from an IT background. The industry is
most often looking for an art degree, and your resume must be very strong.
• Do an art minor. Learn Photoshop / InDesign very well.
• Build a portfolio of projects.
• Do front end programming. Learn to prototype in HTML/CSS/Javascript.

12. Recommendations – Developer
IT Majors make amazing programmers. This isn’t an accident.
• Take extra programming classes for electives.
• Become very strong in at least one language – possibly three.
• Create a github account and contribute regularly. It is a standard interview
question now to ask to see the github.

13. Recommendations – Systems Administrator
• Dealing with switches/networking is never going away. Feel comfortable
with Cisco iOS, routing, and firewall rules.
• Everyone hates Exchange, so you should be an expert with it (Organizations
love Office 365 FYI).
• The Systems Administration course is a MUST, and you should do the
reading and every lab. These are the basics… not advanced requirements of
the position.
• I can’t stress enough that programming is essential. Learn Python.

14. Recommendations – DevOps /
Site Reliability Engineer
• Databases are the hardest to troubleshoot / fix. Become a marginally good
DBA. I recommend SQL mostly, but a lot of organizations are using
something non-relational like MongoDB.
• Learn basic Incident Response Management – Troubleshooting labs in
Networking. Understand Root-Cause Analysis.
• Interact with Restful APIs programmatically.
• Programming is essential – Learn Chef / Puppet (Ruby), Python, Powershell.

15. Recommendations – Security Engineer /
Penetration Tester
• Networking fundamentals are very important.
• Be comfortable with the tools you learn about – Netcat, Nmap, Nessus, JTR,
Metasploit, etc.
• Programming again! Assembly, C, Python, SQL.

16. General Recommendations
Set yourself apart – Contribute to / start a club, enter competitions.
Do side projects (Github, Visual Studio Team Services).
• Build a domain / network services at home.
• Write a simple API, fun web app, or personal portfolio/resume.
• Implement an API in a programming language.
Start an “Engineering Blog” of things you are learning or doing.
Program more. I think I touched on this enough.
Take some classes just for fun.
Play with Azure / AWS. Easy to differentiate early in “the cloud”.