Resources For Recent Graduates: Fill & Download for Free

You're in luck! The City of New York has generously developed (with the support of IBM) an entire web site to answer your exact question! Check out Digital.NYC!

Finding an advisor online is not too bad.The main thing to remember when trying to find an advisor online is you should use the same criteria you would use to find an advisor any other way. For me personally, picking an advisor was based on the following criteria:Successful outcomes of recent graduates from that labCurrent students say great things about the advisorAdvisor and I have similar ways of attacking problems and respect each otherAdvisor has sufficient funding to enable resources for my successThe research area of the lab is interesting enough that I am excited to workAll of the above are things you can discover online. You can look through the recent grads and google them. You can e-mail the current students and ask them what they like about the advisor and what they don’t like.You can also directly email the advisor and ask about how they address research questions, what they are excited about working with students on, and what areas they have the most resources and funding for.Finally, you can of course look at recent publications and grant awards to see the general direction of the lab!The really really tough thing is to gauge the culture of the lab and the school if you don’t go in person. You can’t really tell how people behave over internet questions and see how the members of the lab interact with each other. So if you do have a chance to visit, I recommend it! If you don’t take advantage of as many of the above resources as possible.

Based on the hundred or so candidates I've interviewed so far at Google, Ooyala, and Quora (product), mostly for software engineers, ops engineers, and engineering managers, I'll summarize some of the key traits that I look for in recent college graduates and that often get discussed during interview debriefings. Some of these traits likely apply to non-engineering positions as well, but I'll draw mainly from engineering examples.Strong grasp of fundamentals. A sound understanding of basic concepts like big O analysis or basic design patterns signals that a) the candidate learned and retained knowledge well in the past, and b) the team can build on top of a common language and shared foundation when tackling new problems with the person. This ability is usually well-evaluated during engineering interviews assuming technical questions of sufficient depth. In the absence of other information, transcripts and good grades in harder algorithms classes also help screen for it.Sharp, problem-solving mind. Many problems tackled by a startup tend to be new product problems or technical challenges that have not been solved before. Thus, a sharp mind that can creatively explore solutions tends to be more important than a person's current knowledge. In more than a few cases, an interview candidate who came up with a creative but non-optimal solution because he wasn't previously exposed to the optimal algorithmic technique received stronger technical marks than someone else who came up with the optimal solution; the creative solution suggested that the candidate would be sharp enough to pick up the missing domain knowledge given additional exposure to the material.Curiosity for learning. Most recent college graduates interview with limited experience, with perhaps an internship or two and maybe a year in the workforce. It's inevitable that most of what a recent graduate needs to know will be learned on the job; therefore, how dedicated and fast the candidate is at learning is usually more important than how much the candidate currently knows. Typically, one can assess this quality by seeing how much the recent graduate learned at his previous internships and jobs. Someone who's worked at a place like Google for six or more months but who hasn't taken advantage of Google's codelabs to learn about core engineering abstractions designed by some of the company's best engineers, read their language guides to figure out best practices distilled from the company's collective experience, or delved into design docs of some of their major systems raises a potential red flag. With the abundance of learning resources available at tech companies like Google, a curious and driven person would have taken advantage of the opportunity to improve their abilities.Passion to continually self-improve. This corollary to a curiosity for learning enables a recent graduate to grow into roles of higher difficulty and more responsbility. Poor or weak engineering hires at previous companies I worked for tended to lack a natural curiosity and drive to be better: they were slow at learning available tools, unmotivated to learn the details around the programming language or technology stack they were using so that they could write better code, and received code review feedback on the same mistakes over and over again. Individuals who have become complacent by working for a year or two at non-challenging jobs raise a red flag in this area, particularly if they don't work on any challenging projects on the side. I suspect that part of the reason why I've never interviewed a strong candidate from traditionally slower-moving companies like Oracle and Yahoo (not that strong candidates from these companies don't exist) is that many engineers at those companies may have become too comfortable and stopped optimizing for learning.Effective communication and the ability to clearly convey ideas. In interviews, this trait or lack thereof usually manifests in a candidate's ability or inability to articulate solutions to technical problems or to describe his past projects. Being able to convey ideas effectively usually correlates with a person's ability to think in terms of the bigger picture. Those who get caught up in too many specific details have a harder time explaining things, and miscommunication or the inability to share ideas in a startup can drastically slow down execution speed.Ability to execute and see something through. More open-ended design questions sometimes reveal that a candidate is able to come up with a number of ideas but pogosticks back and forth between them, unsure of which approach to develop further to solve the problem. Even on more straightforward programming questions, I've seen candidates who come up with two ways of doing things but can't commit to implementing either one and instead switch back and forth, making slow progress. Given the open design space of most startups, the inability to pick a solution and run with it can hurt the startup's ability to execute.Commitment to the team. Usually, this requirement is less of an issue with college graduates, since they typically have fewer external commitments and other responsibilities. However, it's important to know that they are willing to commit to whatever hours the startup expects. Especially for earlier stage startups, there's nothing more demotivating than for someone to work 60 hours per week or carry pager duty while the person next to him clocks out after his nine-to-five shift.Though less experienced, recent college graduates oftentimes bring an energy and optimism that help make startups more exciting places to work, and helping them grow to be stronger contributors is a fairly rewarding experience.