There’s a lot more work in the Twin Cities. I like it up here. I like living in a bigger city. There’s a lot to do. It’s cold. The summers are great. I do a lot of biking and running. There are lots of parks for that type of thing. Rooftop decks have been a big thing around here, which you wouldn’t think of since it’s only good for three months. I think it’s important for the reputation of the school for graduates to expand away from Omaha. There are a lot more opportunity in bigger cities for technical-type of people, or that want to work in that field.

I can trace my career directly back to an internship that I had through PKI in Houston. It was called Orillion, a small telecom software company. In the telecom bust, two of their biggest clients went belly-up in the same week. The lady that I ended up working for actually knew Ted Plugge, then the Coordinator of the Career Resource Center. Her recommendation got me in the door at Union Pacific, and then I went with co-workers to a defense contractor at Offutt. Eventually one of those guys went to a company that is now a client of my current firm.

We don’t have much management. We have an owner, two sales guys, and a recruiter, and and an operations director. Pretty much everyone else is billable one way or another. Everybody cares about the growth of the company so everybody is involved. Object Partners is about about 45-50 employees doing java-based consulting, mostly for Fortune 500 companies, with custom application development. We have about 40 consultants up here and three in Omaha. We have a few business analyst consultants, maybe two. The rest are all technical.

Almost all of our programmers are at the Senior Architect type of level. We don’t really send in junior developers. I’m working directly with the business leaders on the client sites on a daily basis.

Our philosophy is to hire good people you want and not necessarily a skillset the client immediately needs. You don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. You want to manage that growth with great people, and sometimes it’s tough. You can read a book and memorize it and ace an interview. But that’s really worthless in our field. It’s more if you understand the basics and the fundamentals of software development and object-oriented programming. That’s tough to get out in a one-hour interview.

Managing growth is an interesting concept. You don’t want to turn down work but you don’t want to hire people just for a job and not have it turn out. Other firms in the area got hit a lot harder in the recession because they didn’t have as good of reputation as we had, so they were the first people to go. We’ve taken a small hit but not a huge hit. It’s difficult to figure out where you draw that line.

We do mostly JVM-based Java, along with Groovy and Groovy on Grails. Recently we’ve begun to get into the mobile space as well, mostly in iOS but also a little into Android. We’ve seen a lot of clients exploring the potential of the iPad.

The professional community is great up here. I do mostly just the Java User Groups. I was fairly active in the Omaha one before I moved.

I don’t know where I’m headed. I really like my company. I would like to go on and get some sort of grad schooling, but I’m not sure in what yet. I honestly don’t know if it would help me out from the technical career point. For the time being, I want to stay technical.

I get to see how a lot of different companies operate without switching jobs. I like it. I essentially switch jobs every month to eighteen months, without switching jobs.

The most important thing, from a consulting standpoint, is you have to be self-motivated. You’re expected to walk into any situation and be the expert in that technical field. You really need to spend a lot of time on your own researching and becoming familiar with new and odd technologies, so when you get thrown into new or tough situations you’re still effective. As a new employee, you go in and train. As a consultant, you go in and lead right away. You really need to be self-motivated and self-educated at learning new things and not be afraid of the challenge of walking into the situation and figuring it out quickly.

This and interviews of other alumni can be found at ScottScholarAlumni.org. If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming interview, have a request to hear about someone else, or just have any other comments or suggestions, please contact Kyle Hoback.

Steve Ryherd is originally from Ankeny, Iowa. He started his Scott Scholarship in 2001 and graduated from PKI in 2006 with a Master’s of Architectural Engineering. He currently lives in Atlanta and works for Arpeggio Acoustic Consulting, LLC. Contact him via Facebook and LinkedIn.

As acoustics consultants, we work with people in the building industry to address sound and vibration issues in the built environment. Arpeggio does anything sound vibration related that doesn’t have wires – we don’t do sound system design.

I came to Arpeggio Acoustic Consulting as a partner three years ago. Every project is unique. Right now, we’re developing a noise ordinance for municipalities in Louisiana. We are helping the policy makers understand the impact of environmental noise on a community. I’m also designing a brand new training facility for the Army Band at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. It involves looking at room acoustics, sound isolation between practice rooms, and mechanical noise control within the building. The neat part about the band training facility is we are a driving force in the design process. Too often we’re brought in as an afterthought.

Recently I was approached by a large church with speech intelligibility issues in their existing sanctuary. In that case, we go on-site to take measurements with a sound level meter to investigate reverberations times. Site visits can be as much qualitative as it is quantitative, running the spectrum from number- crunching analysis to listening for where a noise is coming from or how something sounds.

Living in Atlanta has been wonderful. It’s warm but we still have all the seasons including  our one week of snow per year. This year, we got an unusually high four inches of snow along with a quarter inch of ice with freezing temperatures because of no sun for three days. A guy was even ice skating on Peachtree Street in downtown. This rare winter event shut the city down. Atlanta has four million people and ten snow plows – you do the math. Some people complain about Atlanta’s heat in the summer, but I will take that heat with air-conditioning over months of winter anytime.

I had a friend come down to visit two years ago [who may or may not be the interviewer]. After visiting  the world’s largest aquarium, we left our car there and headed to a Braves game, confirming with a security guard it would be fine before departing. After the game, we get back to find the parking garage closed. We had to climb a wall and get onto a fire escape before finally find our car. After driving around and around, we found a hand-operated exit. We had to answer some questions from another security guard, but it’s one of my more unique stories from Atlanta.

Erica and I are finishing the last few things on our former foreclosed home. We spent the first month with a contractor making it inhabitable and then moved in. The previous owners had managed to destroy it, taking out all lighting fixtures, half of the mechanical systems, and a tub. We’ve been slowly working on it for the last two and a half years but just have the last couple of rooms to paint.

I am the proud owner of a shuffle board table—a lifelong goal that came true much sooner than expected. Sam’s Club had them on clearance for $75. I couldn’t pass it up. We had to rent a special vehicle to get the thing here, but it was well worth it!

The Scott Scholarship provided me the most opportunity for post-secondary education that I could find. It’s a quality degree through the University of Nebraska, but on top of that, you’re surrounded by some of the most intelligent minds in the Midwest with access to professors and staff who are open and supportive of you and your efforts in whatever it is you want to do.

I can’t encourage people enough to study abroad. I spent a semester abroad in Budapest, Hungary, in undergrad and a year abroad in Gothenburg, Sweden, after graduating from the University of Nebraska. The opportunity to look at American society – most likely the only culture you’ve ever known and lived in – from the outside makes you appreciate it more. It opens you up to new ways of thinking. Until you experience living abroad, it’s tough to understand, but it is worth the risk of stepping out of your comfort zone.

Swedish soccer fans were the craziest fans I have ever seen in my life. Sweden is perceived at times as a very passive, neutral country, but when it comes to “football” they are true fanatics. They stood and sang/yelled the whole game. At one point, they brought out road flares in the middle of the crowd which emitted so much smoke I couldn’t see three people away from me, let alone the field.

For a Fulbright Scholarship, there are endless possibilities of where you can go and what you can do. Do your research on the program. Be creative in selecting your destination and your topic of study. I encourage you to not be intimidated about the idea of applying.

Find this and other interviews of Scott Scholar Alumni at ScottScholarAlumni.org. If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming interview, have a request to hear about someone else, or just have any other comments or suggestions, please contact Kyle Hoback.

Lynn Mrsny Griffis is originally from Norfolk, Nebraska. She started her Scott Scholarship in 1997 as part of the first Scott Scholar class. She graduated from PKI in 2001 with a major in Computer Science and also holds a Master’s in Management Information Systems. She is currently in Omaha affiliated with Aviture. Contact her via Facebook.

It was a great education. Senior level classes were a lot more challenging. You’re meeting a lot of professors. I do like the relationships that I was able to build while I was there. I did a lot of the Business Seminar Series events. You got to ask questions early on to some of the people already in the industry, the business leaders, to have that kind of casual conversation and get a feel for it.

Early on, the Scott Scholarship group was pretty small. Almost everyone was in computer science, so you saw everybody in your classes. Group projects were nice. You had other people who were driven and good students.

We didn’t have the dorm life. PKI wasn’t even there. We attended the ceremony for the opening of PKI; that was a neat event. We all just lived in apartments. It was a little different as far as socializing.

Most of us got internships that first year or second year. Everybody was taking advantage and doing well. I got an internship with Lucent, now Avaya, and I worked there even after I graduated. I think that the balance between the education and learning the business side was such a huge key for me.

It’s not necessarily bad to get experience doing a lot of different things. I’ve worked for three large companies: Lockheed Martin, Union Pacific, and Lucent. It’s just been nice to get the different experience in the different industries. All have been doing the same sort of programming and web development with Java. It’s the business knowledge in each industry that is really interesting to see how the technologies are applied.

Recently, I’m working for Aviture, a software consulting company, that provides services on various DoD contracts. I provide architecture support and software development, having done some of the business development in the past, here in Omaha and out in DC, for our different Air Force and Army contracts. I like the DoD work. It’s really nice, really interesting, a good challenge. During my time with Aviture, we have gone from doing just software development and architecture support on DoD projects, to partnering with local high schools in the community to help shape the curriculum for and teach computer science courses, as well as position ourselves to be a more product-focused company. Seeing this take shape and being part of a company like this has been great.

Most recently, I’ve been staying home with our daughter that just turned one year old! She is my most rewarding “job” to date.

I like Java. I started out doing web applications with ASP pages. That was OK. About a year and a half later, I got more into Java development, focusing on front-end development. Java is so widely used across software development. I wouldn’t see myself doing anything other than that. There’re so many scripting languages that can plug-in and frameworks that you can use. There’s more than plenty to do with the language.

If it’s not usable, it’s not good. As we code, especially with early prototypes and designs, we’re always showing that to the customer. We have early sessions with the customer and other members of the team to make sure the front-end is usable, desirable, and adheres to our standards.

We run an adapted process. It’s in between, taking on pieces of Agile and its more rapid releases. It’s definitely different than what the government is used to with their software development cycles. At UP – that was pure Agile. But with DoD it’s recognizing a need to be more Agile. I don’t know if it will get there, just with the heavy process that you need, the CMMI Level 5. The processes must be followed, the documents must be produced, but it’s kind of governed between the government and the contractors.

Your career is not just to sit down and do your job. When you start with a new company, learn as much as you can about the business because that always seemed to help me everywhere I went. You could be coding right along anyone else, but if you’ve had more domain knowledge or business knowledge, you were kind of the go-to person because you could provide more than just somebody who was just developing.

Software development-wise, that’s really easy to transition. That’s what keeps it balanced as you go. The domain knowledge, that’s the toughest part. Your technical skills, they’re always there. You’re always building on those. You’re going to grow as you work at different positions or different roles within a company, or even as you change companies. I liked how you could see one thing somewhere and how you could apply that to another thing somewhere else.

Don’t stop learning. Research stuff on the web, read about the newer technologies, download and play with new frameworks or toolkits. Learn the domain that you’re working in. Learn as much as you can about the business, and excel in what you do. You’ll be surprised in how many opportunities you’ll be presented with.

Find this and other interviews of Scott Scholar Alumni at ScottScholarAlumni.org. If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming interview, have a request to hear about someone else, or just have any other comments or suggestions, please contact Kyle Hoback.

Cary Clark is originally from Elwood, Nebraska. He started his Scott Scholarship in 1999 and graduated with his Bachelor’s Degree in 2003 and Master’s Degree in 2005, both in Computer Science from PKI. He currently lives in Omaha and works for Baldwin, Hackett & Meeks, Inc. Contact him via Facebook.

I wouldn’t be able to code without PKI. Just the overall experience and education was necessary. The new direction PKI is going will help. From what I hear, they’re trying to focusing on researchers and really cranking out those innovative solutions.

My Master’s project was a context-based search algorithm to detect changes in vocabulary. People use a different phrase to describe something in the domain you were looking in. We didn’t have the time or everything we needed to pull it off. I think it’s still a very viable product; it’s just a matter of finding that niche to make it a commercial product. Right now it’s still a little raw. It’s still being researched and worked on at PKI. It’s not dead; it’s just gone back into academia.

The company I work for is Baldwin Hackett and Meeks Inc. which offers software for banks and does a variety of custom projects. In addition we design software for big companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield, Greyhound, MCI, and Union Pacific. Almost everyone in the company has a programming background.

Getting the oppotunity was through my Scott Scholar connections. Nick Hildebrandt was an intern before me, along with a bunch of other Scott Scholars. That’s where I got the connection to even look into BHMI. Nick’s still here, Kevin Walters and Philip Morton as well.

Right now I’m working on an exciting product with UP and Insight Network Logistics called ‘Ship Cars Now’. It’s exciting because the used car market is really taking off, and this allows cars to be shipped over UP’s rail instead of just by truck to reduce costs.

The plan is to continue to evolve and be a better coder and programmer at BHMI. After that, I don’t know. I’ll just have to wait and see. Eventually, I would like to get into project management, but for now I’m entirely happy programming.

I think Java, C#, and C are going to be the front-runners. Scripting languages come up – Ruby, PHP – I think there are plenty of applications and frameworks out there that people are going to bring up and use. We’re still using Java and C# when it comes to the web arena.

I agree with John and Bob, you need to learn those base languages – C, C++ – without those niceties that Java gives you. After that, you need to learn some higher-end languages, particularly how they work with infrastructures. You’re rarely just using Java. You’re using Java and Spring, Java and Struts, Java and JBoss. You have to know how to use your language inside some other framework.

Not everyone is using Java. For strong back-end stuff, people are still doing C++. A lot of BHMI is devoted to C++. We’re dealing with banks, transactions, and what-not. Our products have to handle millions of transactions, and performance is key. With C++, you can get a lot better throughput. Which is going to be faster than Java.

Find this and other interviews of Scott Scholar Alumni at ScottScholarAlumni.org. If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming interview, have a request to hear about someone else, or just have any other comments or suggestions, please contact Kyle Hoback.

I could take a lot of classes and be challenged all the time at PKI. I could take a heavy course load, which prepared me a lot for medical school. Whenever we have any kind of math in medicine, like in some biostatistics lectures, I’m very strong in because our statistics and math background that I had to have for bioinformatics.

Choosing a specialty is like choosing majors in undergrad.  You start out thinking you want to do a certain specialty, but a lot of people end up changing. Third year you do rotations in specialties that everybody is expected to have some knowledge in; fourth year you do pretty much the same thing except for that in the fourth year you get to choose the rotations you do. After the fourth year, you graduate with your MD but you still can’t practice medicine because you have to do residency where you’re actually trained in your specialty.

The summer between my first and second year of medical school, I went to Columbia and worked at a maternity hospital. They wouldn’t let anyone but the pregnant women into the hospital so the women ended up laboring alone, in pain.  They didn’t have any anesthesia. They just had an exam table with stirrups and a big, black plastic tarp over the table so that they could hose everything off after delivery.  At the end of the table, there was a big trash can for all the fluid to fall down into. You had to catch the baby and make sure it didn’t fall into the trash can. The hospital was clean and a safer place to have a baby than at home. It met the World Health Organization’s standards for delivering babies and was better than nothing. It was free and run by the government, but it was definitely bare bones.

I get to see patients that not everyone gets to see because I can speak Spanish. You get more of the nuances of the conversation and what someone’s trying to tell you if you speak their language. No translation is going to be perfect.  You miss a lot of little details that are lost in translation that can be helpful in trying to figure out what’s going on.

I’ve finally decided that I want to go into radiology.  I’m in the process of applying now.  The application process goes from September until March of the next year.  At the end of the process you rank all of the places you would like to go, and the residency programs rank who they would like.  Everyone in the nation submits their ranking lists, a computer spits out the results, and on the same day, everyone across the nation gets the results.  At UNMC we don’t find out where we will go until we open an envelope at a ceremony with our class and families.  It’s interesting to watch reactions because not everybody gets to go where they want.  I chose radiology because the field relies heavily on computers and physics which are some of my strengths.

Take advantage of the financial freedom that being a Scott Scholar gives you. It’s good to get a job and build your resume, but you are also in a unique position to actually have time and money simultaneously.  Travel and do things that interest you now because the more committed you get to work and school, the less you’ll have an opportunity to do what you want, when you want.

This and future interviews of Scott Scholar Alumni will be found at ScottScholarAlumni.org. If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming interview, have a request to hear about someone else, or just have any other comments or suggestions, please contact Kyle Hoback.