Am I Entry Level?

Posted: January 8th, 2008 | Author: Jamie Phelps | Filed under: All Posts | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

This might sound like a strange question, but I’m honestly interested in the answer.

Many who read this blog know a lot about my situation, but here is where I stand right now. I’m 27 years old working on a computer science degree at TCU. The way my prerequisites and course sequences work out, this spring is my last semester of full time work. I’ll graduate after two more half-time semesters in May 2009. My plan (and quite a common course for many here) is to work full time while I finish up my last year of school.1

I have been doing freelance web design for almost two years. I am largely self-taught in most everything having to do with computers, and as a result I’m often bored in my programming classes.2 I’m a very quick study. I consider myself above average in my programming skill and I’m well ahead of most of the others in my classes.

I’m currently an intern at Pier 1 Imports working in the data analysis/data warehousing group. It’s good experience so far, and I don’t think I would mind sticking around full time until I graduate. But that being said, I will be exploring my options starting sometime around spring break.

The question is this: Am I an entry level employee? Or to put it another way, when I’m looking for a job, which job titles should I not even bother with? Any more information you’d need to answer more cogently?

  1. The last year is Database Systems and Senior Design/Project Management in the fall and Database Administration and Senior Project in the spring. The database classes I don’t anticipate imparting any earth-shattering wisdom since I have messed with database systems on my own and my internship has been pretty database intensive. But I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to actually learn something. ↩

  2. For example, I took a class in the fall called Interface Design and Scripting Fundamentals. It’s a required class for my degree. There was no interface design discussion (Had there been, I might have learned something!) and the class focused almost exclusively on learning Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a little bit of PHP at the end for good measure and using scripting languages to interact with MySQL. I already knew almost everything we covered in that class. In fact, I gave a lecture on Script.aculo.us instead of doing one of the lab assignments. The second half of that course’s sequence is this spring and it’s called Web Technologies. I don’t anticipate learning a lot in there either. ↩

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