Alumni Spotlight!

Since we have a group of students and faculty off at the 2015 Grace Hopper Conference, our alumni spotlight this week is Jessica Kostiou, who graduated as a Software Engineering student in May 2015. She was an attendee of the GHC of 2014 with Monmouth and was kind enough to share her opinion of Monmouth with you all!

This past may, I graduated Monmouth with a bachelors in Software Engineering and a minor in math. I decided to switch into the major the fall of my sophomore year, and thanks to my advisor and some of my other professors they helped me plan my schedule so that I was still able to graduate in four years. What I found most valuable is the experience the CS/SE department provided me with outside of my classes. I was a general member of our IEEE and ACM group at Monmouth, our student chapter of two professional engineering societies. Here I had the opportunity to participate in hackathons, do outreach to local high schools and work on personal programming projects in groups to gain experience outside of class. My junior and senior year I was elected as treasurer, where I was able to eventually help the rest of our e-board with making the IEEE and ACM Student Chapter an official club at Monmouth.

Through this club I also had the opportunity to travel to Phoenix my senior year and attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Here several students and I were able to spend a week in classes on topics ranging from team development to cyber security, and had the opportunity to interview with leading technology companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. I heard from amazing leaders Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Megan Smith, the CTO of the United States and many others who inspired me to continue pursuing my career in software.

The summer after my junior year I was fortunate enough to intern with Lockheed Martin, and accept a job in their leadership development program the August before my senior year. I am currently working there full time, and pursuing a masters degree in Systems Engineering. I owe a large part of the success I have had post-graduation to my peers and the faculty of the CS/SE department at Monmouth University. I will admit that at first I was unsure of switching my major, but this department is small but mighty. It has grown in size since I attended Monmouth as a freshman in 2011, and I would not have been able to have half of the experiences that I did if I had attended a larger tech school. Software Engineering at Monmouth is a unique degree, and I have learned that I have gained experience in my field that many other students have not had the opportunity to. If you are looking for a degree that will teach you much more than just how to program, Monmouth is the place for you.