This is more of a jour­nal entry than a blog post, but I hope other new col­lege grads and those about to be can take some­thing from my expe­ri­ence. To sum­ma­rize — I worked, I trav­elled, I waited, I made it.

A lit­tle over a year ago, I went to a 3rd round inter­view in Chicago for Accen­ture. It was a stress­ful day among the end­less intro­duc­tions, mul­ti­ple inter­views, and nose­bleed at lunch in front of the other recruits and cur­rent employ­ees. I walked away tweet­ing it was 1st class and didn’t think I made the cut. A few weeks later I got an offer! It was my third along with Arcelor­Mit­tal and the NSA. I stopped inter­view­ing with other com­pa­nies and accepted it. I was Chicago bound!

Before I grad­u­ated in May, I was noti­fied that my start date had been pushed back from my requested June 1st to Novem­ber 16th. As some­one who had grown impa­tient wait­ing for Christ­mas breaks to end, I was hor­ri­fied. What the hell was I going to do for 6 months?

To start, I went home for a few weeks and con­quered a mas­sive to-do list for my par­ents (wire­less this, back­ups that, you know) while sim­pli­fy­ing my way of life based on the “100 thing chal­lenge”. I helped my neigh­bor with a small project and the itch was on to get involved with some­thing. I con­sid­ered email­ing Gary Vayn­er­chuk to see if he’d put me up for a few months in NYC in exchange for help­ing Vayn­er­me­dia get off the ground by doing what­ever I could. Luck­ily, there was a startup just as inter­est­ing launch­ing in Bloom­ing­ton. I attended the Sprout­Box open­ing mak­ing a point to talk to Mike Trotzke so I could express my inter­est in, again, show­ing up to do what­ever I could. We had met at career fairs before and I fol­lowed him on Twit­ter so I didn’t feel like a com­plete stalker approach­ing him.

Sprout­Box

After being through dozens of inter­views just 6 months ago, I was incred­i­bly ner­vous to meet with Trotzke and ask if I could work for free to help them out. He wel­comed the help and I was back in the gritty startup envi­ron­ment I fell in love with at ChaCha. From day one I learned some­thing new every day! I walked in there like I had a col­lege edu­ca­tion but was clue­less when it came to ver­sion con­trol sys­tems or PHP frameworks.

Thank­fully every­one from Kyle and Matt (design­ers) to Dave and Cameron (devel­op­ers) to even Marc, Mike, and Brad (cofounders) were avail­able to con­sult for help imme­di­ately next to me if they weren’t busy fly­ing heli­copters, glid­ing scoot­ers through the office, or plan­ning Tequila Tues­days. I looked for­ward to com­ing to “work” in the morn­ing and learned as much as pos­si­ble from every­one there. I loved my time at Sprout­Box. I wish they would have been hir­ing when I was hunt­ing for jobs.

Epp­ley Insitute

I was quickly run­ning out of grad­u­a­tion money so I applied to work for the Epp­ley Insti­tute as a web devel­oper. Dur­ing my inter­view, I did the 2009 — match a face to a Twit­ter avatar who ended up being Jacob Gube (goo-beh for the non-l33ts). I thought he was set­ting me up when he asked what sort of blogs I fol­lowed for design and devel­op­ment. I said the obvi­ous Smash­ing Mag­a­zine and Web Designer Depot along with a few smaller (now big­ger) names like Chris Wal­lace, Rogie King, and Tim Van Damme. I pur­posely didn’t men­tion Six Revi­sions and tweeted about it after­wards.

That tweet caught the eyes of both inter­view­ers (Matt and Jacob). Every career coun­selor will tell you to do your home­work about the com­pany you’re inter­view­ing with and that you should write hand-written let­ters to thank them after­wards. Since there wasn’t much info out there about Epp­ley, I relied on my knowl­edge of the web design/developer com­mu­nity. Instead of wast­ing my time with a most likely illeg­i­ble post-interview thank you note, I got the atten­tion of both inter­view­ers while blast­ing a good word about their com­pany to all of my fol­low­ers in less than 140 characters.

At Epp­ley, I was given the daunt­ing task of mash­ing together three dif­fer­ent open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems to sat­isfy a num­ber of require­ments from every branch of the company’s org chart. Basi­cally, they wanted a more robust ecom­merce solu­tion that kept their user sys­tem synced with their exist­ing eLearn­ing sys­tem. There were restric­tions such as pay­ment meth­ods the uni­ver­sity could accept, delays such as mar­ket­ing reports that would shape the brand­ing and lay­out of the site, and even lim­i­ta­tions of what the open source solu­tions could deliver even with their world­wide net­work of devel­op­ers and sup­port­ers. It was one of the tough­est projects I had ever taken on.

Frus­tra­tion grew, progress slowed, life went on. I signed a lease for an apart­ment in Chicago and had to start pay­ing rent even though I was still in Bloom­ing­ton. My car died so I had to bor­row my brother’s car to get to/from work. Jet­Blue announced their ‘All You Can Jet’ pass. All of that made me decide to chalk up the Epp­ley project as a loss and move on.

I admit I failed at com­plet­ing that project and it was a valu­able expe­ri­ence in a pro­fes­sional set­ting. It’ll be my go-to story the next time I’m faced with the inevitable inter­view ques­tion “tell me about a time you didn’t suc­ceed”. I have my the­o­ries and sug­ges­tions on how we could have done things dif­fer­ently (which is how you end those types of inter­view ques­tions) but the Epp­ley web devel­op­ers were great to work with regardless.

All You Can Jet

I made the com­plete and offi­cial move to Chicago at the begin­ning of Sep­tem­ber only to fly to Boston a few days later. Then we flew to Los Ange­les, Port­land, DC, Seat­tle, and San Diego touch­ing down in Chicago every week for clean clothes and a good night sleep. I also went to Sara­sota and Las Vegas to round out my 26 flights in 30 days. I had the time of my life and only regret not tak­ing more pic­tures, shoot­ing more video, and writ­ing more blog posts about all the awe­some things we did. (I did try to post to Twit­ter, Brightkite, Face­book, and other social sites so our trav­els didn’t go totally undocumented.)

Free­lanc­ing

For the last 6 weeks before start­ing my career with Accen­ture, I looked to take on small projects so I could pay the rent and maybe have a few beers on the week­ends. I was very lim­ited in regards to what jobs I could take on since I couldn’t com­mit to any­thing longer than a month or two.

I pri­mar­ily used Craigslist to find small local computer-related jobs. The Chicago net­work is pretty active so there were a cou­ple dozen posts a day to sift through. I responded to over 100 posts and maybe heard back from 10 (never in a timely fash­ion even though most posts said they needed help ASAP or to have the project done tomor­row). It was appalling how une­d­u­cated and unpro­fes­sional the peo­ple look­ing for help were. Every­one wanted every­thing for noth­ing if they even knew what they wanted. It was beyond frus­trat­ing to the point I wrote a post just to vent.

Some­how I was able to find a few projects and pay my rent on time. Over­all it was a very hum­bling expe­ri­ence and made me appre­ci­ate my pend­ing job with Accen­ture all that much more. I real­ized how unpre­pared I was to be a free­lancer. Not so much the tech­ni­cal aspects, but busi­ness related tasks such as invoic­ing and con­tracts. I exper­i­mented using my Google Voice num­ber as my “busi­ness” line but even that needs some per­fect­ing. If I had to do it again, I would def­i­nitely approach friends and fam­ily for projects and not waste my time on Craigslist. If I was more estab­lished I would have felt more com­fort­able bid­ding for big­ger projects on pro­fes­sional designer/developer job boards, but I didn’t think I was ready to com­pete with peo­ple who free­lance for a living.

Start­ing at Accenture

After my first week at my new job, I know I’m at the right place. From the peo­ple to the cor­po­rate cul­ture to the end­less extra perks, I’ve calmed any wor­ries I had about putting my life on hold in order to start this career. I’m excited about the kind of projects I’ll be involved with next year being in the Iden­tity and Access Man­age­ment secu­rity group in Tech­nol­ogy Consulting.

The last six months have been a blast! I met a lot of great peo­ple, vis­ited a lot of new places, and man­aged to not run out of money in the process.