I am currently in my junior year studying for a B.S. in Computer
Science and B.A in Economics at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. I
am looking for specific and substantial financial scholarships that I
am particularly well suited for to cover most of a $30,000 tuition
bill for senior year. In general, scholarships which are only awarded
to a single person are not what I'm looking for unless you believe I
am an exceptional match to their desired recipient. Somewhere between
ten and fifteen different scholarships should be provided, the better
tailored they are the less I need. They should each be for
substantial awards, at the very least $7,500 because I would rather
put considerable effort applying for a small number of scholarships
instead of CCing the same applications to many places.
To answer this question well, I have to tell you about myself, and you
can use my background to match-make:
I am 20 years old, white, and English speaking. (Scholarships
weighted towards minority or underrepresented groups should be
avoided) My family has little yearly income (parents are retried) but
enough assets to eliminate the
possibility of need-based aid. I went to public high school in
Natick, MA and graduated in 2000. My GPA in high school was not
impressive mostly because I was bored to tears, so I would shy away
from scholarships which request high school transcripts.
The summer after graduating high school I was offered and accepted an
intern position at Cisco systems. I started out writing test scripts
in Perl/TCL for a DSL provisioning system, and continue to work for
Cisco while taking classes at Brandeis. After being hired I went on
to do network management platform development, management GUIs, and an
automated test tool (for SNMP) which is in the process of becoming a
company-wide standard. Two months after I started working at Cisco I
moved out and rented an apartment a couple blocks from work. I ate,
breathed, and slept Cisco. Jobs which should take months I’ve been
known to finish up by 4:00am the next day.
Working at Cisco I've traveled dozens of times to offices in RTP,
Austin, and mostly San Jose giving presentations on network management
testing to other teams, and working with remote members of my team on
critical projects. I started my college education by taking distance
courses through Harvard University (from my cube, usually around
1:00am while waiting for compiles to finish). I worked double-time,
usually 60-70 hour weeks for a year and a half before going to
Brandeis as a full-time student.
Since becoming a “full-time student” I’ve continued to work at Cisco,
usually around 30 hours/week in addition to classes. I find college
classes to be about as boring as high school, with the rare exception
(this semester Cognitive Modeling isn’t challenging but at least
interesting!). I’ve petitioned to take extra courses, so I’m taking 6
courses per semester and am on track to graduate with a B.S. in
Computer Science and a B.A. in Economics after 2-1/2 semesters.
-------
My parents worked hard for the money they have in the bank to retire,
so I don’t begrudge them wanting to hold on to as much of it as
possible. They’ve left me to use the money I earned at Cisco to pay
for tuition, but it’s painful to see hard-earned money go towards such
ridiculous classes. Unfortunately my bosses-bosses-boss feels that I
need a slip of paper, and so here I am taking classes.
An example of the kind of scholarships I am looking for is one offered
by Microsoft. See details at:
http://microsoft.com/college/scholarships/general.asp. There are two
problems with this scholarship:
1) its focus on female and underrepresented minority applicants
2) it's overpublished and probably has a massive applicant pool
...but it has the kind of technology focus I’m looking for.
If you would like more perspective on what I’ve been doing at Cisco
the past 2-1/2 years I could also post a recommendation written by my
boss for college applications.
Thanks,
--Jeremy |
Clarification of Question by
jeremy61-ga
on
21 Nov 2002 00:53 PST
Bosses College Recommendation:
I hired Jeremy as an intern in the Network Management Platform
Development Team
for Cisco Systems in Boxborough, Massachusetts. Jeremy started
working in the team in August, 2000, after completing high school.
Jeremy is very bright, energetic and a fast learner. He is also a
hard worker and via hard work he ensures that his deliverables are of
the highest quality. Jeremy has surpassed any and every expectation I
and my management team had of an intern. He has developed high
quality commercial software in incredibly short timeframes. He
frequently travels to support customers and other teams within Cisco.
He has completed lengthy functional and design specifications. He has
presented new technologies
to other teams within Cisco and to customers. It is hard to believe
that Jeremy is only 19.
Jeremy’s first assignment at Cisco was to support unit test and
integration of Cisco’s DSL modem (CPE) auto-provisioning solution.
Jeremy worked with the lead software developers to create a fully
automated test harness. This was Jeremy’s first exposure to working
at major company – he quickly understood and operated within the
development process followed at Cisco. He also excelled at completing
his tasks.
Jeremy’s automated harness was run by all of the developers’ whenever
they made modifications and was run on a nightly basis. It uncovered
bugs during our development cycle – which enabled us to deliver higher
quality software. Jeremy documented the operation of the harness and
gave presentations to test teams within Cisco on the operation of the
harness. The documentation and presentations are on par with
presentations given by senior engineers. All of the teams are/were
very impressed with the completeness and sophistication of the
automated test harness that Jeremy designed and implemented.
Jeremy’s next assignment was to develop a GUI (Graphical User
Interface) for Cisco’s DSL auto-provisioning solution. Jeremy created
the application using Java – he worked over the Christmas holidays to
teach himself Java and create the core portion of the application.
The application was a major success – all internal and external
customers were very pleased with it (it replaced an application that
was previously implemented within Cisco). Jeremy continued to develop
the application for the next 2 months in addition to his other test
tasks. He followed a rigid software process, all defects were
tracked, release notes were attached to every release – a “smoke” test
was run prior to each release. The software, entitled the OpenDSL
Software Manager released with the updated version of Cisco’s DSL
modem auto-provisioning solution.
Jeremy’s next assignment was to perform platform software development
on Cisco’s IOS (Internet Operating System). To perform this task
Jeremy had to come up to speed on Cisco’s embedded operating system
and write software in the C programming language. Of course, Jeremy
came up to speed quickly and performed many key development tasks.
Jeremy has improved his skills (which were very good before coming to
Cisco) in all areas during his tenure at Cisco. He has excellent
written and verbal communication skills, he has extraordinary software
development skills and has excellent people skills. He is a young star
and we wish him well in his academic pursuits and hope that he quickly
returns to Cisco. I am confident he will excel in any academic
program in which he enrolls.
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