About Us

Learn all about the CS Grad Job and Interview Guide.

Authors

This guide was written by Wes Weimer (University of Michigan), Claire Le Goues (Carnegie Mellon University), Zak Fry (GrammaTech), Kevin Leach (Vanderbilt University), Yu Huang (Vanderbilt University), Kevin Angstadt (St. Lawrence University), and Madeline Endres (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). We elicited select input from others, and indicate who/where throughout, where relevant.

In this Guide, we generally offer collective advice and speak in general terms. However, we will sometimes refer to specific authors by name. We provide information about each author’s search below to provide context.

  • Wes Weimer: Conducted a 2005 search for a position in programming languages or software engineering in academia or industry; accepted a position as a tenure track assistant professor at the University of Virginia. He is now a professor at the Univeristy of Michigan.

  • Claire Le Goues: Conducted a 2013 search for a position in programming languages or software engineering in research academia or industry; accepted a position as a tenure track assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She has since served on the hiring committee and as Chair of the hiring committee a number of times in her home department at CMU, S3D.

  • Zak Fry: Conducted a 2014 search for industrial research positions in software systems; accepted a role as a Research Scientist at GrammaTech.

  • Kevin Angstadt: Conducted a 2019 search for a programming languages position in teaching-focused academia; accepted a position as a tenure track assistant professor at St. Lawrence University.

  • Kevin Leach: Conducted a two-body (with spouse Yu Huang) 2020 search for a position in software engineering or security in research or teaching-focused academia; accepted a position as a tenure track assistant professor at Vanderbilt University.

  • Madeline Endres: Conducted a 2024 search for a software engineering position in research academia; accepted a position as a tenure track assisstant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Kevin Angstadt and Madeline Endres are the primary maintainers of this version of the guide (there are older versions out there, but we anticipate this site to be most up-to-date).

Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community to this guide. The repository is hosted on GitHub. If you have any questions about contributing, please email Madeline Endres at mendres@umass.edu.

Contributing Application Materials

We are always looking for more application material profiles, especially for job-types or job-locations that are currently under-represented in our guide. These materials are hosted on the Example Materials tab, and can help students contextualize their application and deal with imposter syndrome.

If you are interesting in contributing your materials, please fill out our contribution form available here. This form includes places to upload PDFs of your materials, as well as add any information you’d like to better contextualize your application for readers. In this form, you can also indicate if you’d like to be kept anonymous. All materials are optional – we greatly appreciate anything you’d be willing to share!

Problems with the Website

Did you notice something wrong with the website (something not working or a typo)? Please create an issue on our GitHub project.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge all of our colleagues who have aided (directly and indirectly) in the creation of this guide. You may safely assume that all of the good ideas here come from them and that all bad advice comes from us.

Many wise and wonderful people were kind enough to grant Wes the boon of their wisdom on this subject. They include, but are not limited to:

  • Alex Aiken (Stanford)
  • Ras Bodik (Berkeley)
  • Katherine Compton (Wisconsin)
  • Richard Fateman (Berkeley)
  • Jill Findeis (PSU)
  • Stephen Freund (Williams)
  • Patrice Godefroid (Bell Labs)
  • Sumit Gulwani (Microsoft)
  • Tom Henzinger (EPFL)
  • Ranjit Jhala (UCSD)
  • Iain Keddie (IBM)
  • Jim Larus (Microsoft)
  • David Liben-Nowell (Carleton)
  • Tessa Lau (IBM)
  • Rupak Majumdar (UCLA)
  • Wayne McMullen (PSU)
  • Greg Morrisett (Harvard)
  • George Necula (Berkeley)
  • Jens Palsberg (UCLA)
  • Sriram Rajamani (Microsoft)
  • David Shoenthal (Longwood)
  • Raj Varma (Delaware)
  • Mark Wegman (IBM)
  • Donna Weimer (Juniata)

Claire did not consult many people for her contributions to this document, as she modified it after it had long been written. However, beyond Wes, she would particularly like to acknowledge the support and assistance of:

  • Katie Stolee (Iowa State)
  • Yuriy Brun (UMass-Amherst)
  • Reid Holmes (Waterloo)
  • Ivan Beschastnikh (UBC)
  • Stephanie Forrest (UNM)
  • John Knight (UVA)

… and the many others who offered advice and support throughout her own job search.

Zak had a similarly short list of consultations, as he targeted exclusively industrial research positions and arguably had a more “homogeneous” job search experience overall:

  • Wes Weimer (UVA)
  • Lori Pollock (UD)
  • Stephanie Forrest (UNM)
  • John Knight (UVA)
  • Pieter Hooimeijer (Facebook)
  • Ray Buse (Google)
  • Joel Coffman (Johns Hopkins APL)

License

The text of this guide is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

This guide includes some publicly-available application materials for comparison and convenience. You could get them off of archive.org yourself if you so desired. All application materials remain the property of their respective authors and are shared here by permission.