Last week I got a chance to interview a handful of co-op candidates from University of Manitoba’s Computer Science program. We got to sit down and talk with a number of very bright, well-educated people and we seemed to interest a significant number of them. I remember one of the things that attracted me to Tipping Canoe was that TC “gets the web” in the sense that our business is completely online – we live and breath web day-to-day. We don’t just slap a website on a regular business or try to “webify” a service.

Just as a disclaimer, this article might come off sounding a bit elitist or idealistic if you take it the wrong way. We take our coding seriously, but not ourselves – we know that most of us can’t/didn’t live up to all of these. It’s more of something to strive toward.

And now on to those secrets!

Before your work term

Taking the right classes and showing your dedication
It’s critical that you do your best in your school classes, especially if you’ve never had any programming (or similar) jobs or projects prior to your first co-op work term. The only evidences of hard work are a) the classes you chose and b) how well you did in them. The classes I look at in particular are OO, DB, Distributed, and SE. Of course, the occasional VW or C is fairly common, but make sure that it’s the exception and not the rule.

Proving yourself outside the classroom
Of course, dedication and ambition can be show outside the classroom – contributing to open source projects or running your own business are examples.

Landing the co-op position

Applying
The first thing we see from co-op students is your cover letter, resume, and transcript. Each of these have a particular role and you want to make sure they each do their job:

• Cover letter: Show that you’re interesting to us and interested in us. Please, please, please…don’t write a long introduction. I know many of you don’t like writing in the first place, but please don’t make us suffer. Write your cover letter, then cut it in half. And then cut it in half again. Use short words and less of them. This is a great chance to make yourself distinct. Humour and usefulness are good marketting tools.
•  Resume: Show that you have experience and you’ve made the most of each work/school situation you’ve been in. We know that sometimes you get bummer jobs where you don’t get to program, but in those situations, were you able to go above and beyond – perhaps writing some macros to automate part of your work?
•  Transcript: Show that you work hard and have a plan for school. Grades, class selection, and improvement history are all we really have to evaluate here.

Interviewing
Gerri and her staff seem to do a great job prepping you for your interviews, so listen to them for general advice. In regards to clothing, we won’t judge you. Gerri will want you in a suit and we don’t want you to get in trouble. : )

As with your cover letter, during the interview we will assess how interesting you are and how interested you are in us – by reading this blog entry you’re obviously pretty interested in us already and you’ve earned 5 gold coins. After 10 interviews, it’s hard to remember all but the most distinct people, so take that into account.

Our interview questions are apparently infamous around the co-op program. We do enjoy somewhat complicated problems, but the secret is that we want to see how you tackle them. It gives us a small window into how you’ll solve problems day-to-day, which is very important in our line of work!

We almost always have a database design question too, so be sure to take that DB class (or study on your own) so that you’re able to tackle that one well. (And yes, we do a lot of database work here at TC.)

Working and coming back

If you’re one of the successful candidates and come work for us, we’ll be excited to have you as part of a team of programmers. (We don’t have “co-op projects” or hide you in a corner.) Do your best and we’ll help with training on specifics. We’ve had a number of co-op students return for a second term, which is great for both of us, but we encourage diverse work experience, so we don’t usually have co-ops stay with us for all three terms.

Whew! That was a bit longer than I thought it was going to be. Hope it’s helpful!

- Orion