Sell-outs

I was more than a little perturbed to receive an email today inviting me to a Credit Suisse recruitment event for IT students. The email was sent by a member of staff at Aston, and the recruitment event was scheduled for a Thursday in term time - when IT students will all have lectures. It seemed I was being actively encouraged to ditch lectures in order to visit Credit Suisse.

Bizarre no? I was sure Aston was meant to care more about our education than Credit Suisse's graduate scheme.

I did a bit more digging around and discovered this document. It's basically an offer from Aston Careers' Service to prostitute themselves for any company willing to pay for the pleasure. Now you see why I do all my job hunting away from the University - at least I can assure I'm getting impartial advice.

What I find even stranger though, is that it cost a mere £50 for Credit Suisse to have that invite sent to every technology student. These students though, numbering in their hundreds, all paid thousands of pounds for the education they're receiving this year. You'd think the Uni would ask for more than £50 before they suggested throwing that out of the window...

Microsoft Student Technology Day

I've resumed my duties as a Microsoft Student Partner for this year, and the second treat* was an expenses-paid trip down to London for me and some friends for a series of technology talks from a few folks from Microsoft, including the CEO himself, Steve Ballmer.

The whole shindig was in Festival Hall, and started off with the CEO of Huddle.net giving some advice on how to start and run your own little start-up company, drawing on his experiences from starting Huddle. There were some really useful tips about how to deal with venture capitalists, how to get funding in general and how to get help and support from various groups, one of which I can personally vouch for - Minibar London.

Next up was 'The Science Behind Live Search'. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get to see much science, but saw lots of cool usage trend graphs - bit scary to see how much you're monitored as you search away. Also interesting to note that 40% of searches end in failure, 50% of searches are just repeats of something that person has looked for before and that enough people actually use Live Search to be able to gather reliable statistics like these ;)



The third talk was the reason I turned up - Artificial Intelligence by Microsoft Research. Given that my final year project's going to have a bunch of that stuff in it, it was great to see it explained, and the various formulae put into context. Cool presentation too - mostly based around computer games.



Next was Steve Ballmer...and if you've never seen him present then:

a) Find a YouTube video
b) Find a YouTube video

Seriously, the guy is hilarious. 'Exuberant' doesn't come close to describing his style. He also had some very interesting stuff to say about the future of technology, and really knew his stuff well.

We rounded off the day with a presentation from my old colleague Paolo, who got to show off the trendy Surface, which even has a programmable API and emulator that'll be released to the public soon. Sweet.

Edit: Found a video of a bit of Paolo's talk:



Get in touch if you want any more detail on the above, or some contacts to talk about this stuff with :)

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*_{The first treat was a nice shoulder bag filled with goodies and software...and four RJ11-RJ11 adapters. Note that that reads 'adapter' not 'extension'. If anyone can think of a use for a RJ11-RJ11 adapter, let me know.}