After graduating from Wake with a BS in Computer Science, I moved to San Francisco and joined KPMG's IT Advisory practice, specifically within the Information Risk Management group. Most of my time with this group was spent performing IT general control assessments in support of external financial statement audit teams. After 8 months, I transitioned into a role within KPMG's Software Contract Compliance team based in Mountain View, California, where I helped conduct software compliance audits on behalf of enterprise software vendors. After about a year and a half with KPMG, I left to join Accenture's Security Strategy and Risk Management practice and have been based out of the San Francisco office since. My projects thus far have surrounded data protection and privacy-oriented work for pharmaceutical companies.

Since graduating, David moved back home to New Jersey where he job-hunted for a month and a half until he landed an internship with Accenture Technology Solutions. ATS is a subsidiary of Accenture, a global consulting and outsourcing firm. The internship was a training course in Java development focusing on the Software Development Lifecycle. The internship lasted about a month. During that month, the interns were evaluated on their knowledge of development via tests and coding assignments as well as a group project in which the Java backend of a website was to be coded, implemented, and tested using existing JSP pages and the Struts framework. Afterwards, David was notified along with others in the class that they were offered full-time positions within ATS. Based out of Florham Park, New Jersey, David works for clients relatively close to the main office. As of September 2007, David has worked with three clients so far since joining ATS. He was first with Johnson and Johnson doing manual application testing for a web project. Then he was placed at Medidata, a company that provides medical data storage/reporting solutions, where he oversaw the Quality Control process for newly developed and tested applications. Now with Bristol-Meyers Squibb, David is one of three Test Leads for their outsourced testing service, where he coordinates the testing effort with both the offshore testing team in Bangalore, India as well as with BMS project managers. After a year with ATS, David has since been promoted from the position of Programmer to Senior Programmer. When not at work, he can be found playing the drums, guitar, bass guitar or electric violin (which he’s still in the process of learning), but mostly bass guitar for an as-yet-unnamed band. They’re looking for gigs if anyone's interested! 

After graduation I headed south to Houston, TX to work for Boeing on the International Space Station. While there I was in the group responsible for testing the flight software that controls the station. Specifically I worked with the Command & Control and Guidance, Navigation & Control modules. I was also a member of the tools team which made various C# applications that the entire group used to perform various duties. While the job was pretty interesting, it wasn't very challenging and I wanted something more.
 
A friend who I worked with at Boeing left to go to Amazon.com in Seattle, WA. After a couple of months he recruited me and now I'm in Seattle working for Amazon. I work in the e-Commerce Platform team, specifically with the Community Platform team. We're responsible for features such as Customer Reviews, Discussion Boards and Reputation. Currently I'm working with the team to help build a completely new application from the ground up and it has proved to be very interesting. When I'm not churning out code I'm usually found at the company foosball table or dart board.
 

In terms of recent experiences since graduation, Chris has been bizzy with a new position as a recent graduate in the working realm.  His company, CGI, is a firm which specializes in IT solutions for companies from all sectors, including government, health care, banking, retail, and Chris’s current field, telecommunications.  Chris is now the Operations Team Lead, working on a team of four with three members below him.  They deal with long-distance billing for a bulk of the calls made in the Southeast through AT&T/Cingular/Sprint/Qwest.  Within the project, they have a partition consisting of three teams.  Development actually generates the coding solutions.  Chris’s test team then implements the code in a variety of environments, determining whether or not the code will adversely affect previously implemented solutions.  Chris works on the operations team, which is responsible for all code and services once it has entered production. Production is a live environment where any change or modification in daily routine directly affects the client.  It's an interesting job, which Chris says has challenged his use of UNIX-based programming.  Chris creates a multitude of scripts to make his life easier, and he says it's really amazing the ability Korn shell scripting has to offer.  Besides work, Chris has been busy traveling to places around the country and around the world.  Immediately following graduation, he and his family travelled to the northern borders of Canada, staying in an area north of Minden (six hours north of Toronto, Ontario).  He has also made trips to Vail, Colorado; Seaside, Florida;  San Francisco, California; and  Freeport, Bahamas.  His most recent trip was to Europe, to visit friends in Paris, France, and Dublin, Ireland.

Steve began working with a start-up hedge fund in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2006 doing data mining to find investment strategies.  He expects to transfer within the company to do business consulting in the near future. Outside of work, Steve has done some travelling, including a trip to Costa Rica with a friend who grew up there. Steve is still doing a lot of painting and is playing with a great orchestra in the city. He says that it's not the same as at Wake Forest, where he had the opportunity to do the things he enjoyed all day long.  He says that the real challenge is to figure out a career that accomplishes that. Update -- starting his PhD in Computer Science this fall at Harvard working with HT Kung.

After graduating from Wake Forest in 2005, Annie attended Georgia Tech to study Digital Media.  The program there exposes students to many disciplines of technology and humanities  - such as video games, machinima, interactive narratives, and mobile technology.  Annie focused on interactive television and was part of a group that prototypes new interactive television technologies in Flash.  She was lucky enough to work as the Emerging TV Technologies intern for the Emmys last summer in LA.  Then she returned to Georgia Tech to complete her degree with a Master’s project that prototyped tagging as a navigational tool for exploring television content.  She has since moved on to Yahoo! where she’s working as an interaction designer for an exciting new personal advertising project.  She’s enjoying the challenge and is loving the weather!

Andrew graduated in May of 2005 and received his commission in the U.S. Army through the Wake Forest ROTC program. He is a light cavalry officer assigned to the 1st Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment. He is currently stationed in southern Baghdad as the executive officer and second-in-command of a light reconnaissance troop. His unit is responsible for providing security to three neighborhoods in the heart of Baghdad. Andrew is sceduled to return to the U.S. sometime in May 2008. After fulfilling his obligation to the Army in May 2009, Andrew plans to go back to school for his MBA.

After graduation, Jim took a job at the company he interned with between junior and senior year as a software developer.  They were a contractor for the FAA, and the primary project Jim was assigned to was the voice-switch and control subsystem component of the air-traffic control system.  He spent about two years there, and, while the atmosphere and the people were great, he felt underpaid and unstimulated by the work.   Since then, Jim has been working as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin Corporation, at their Moorestown, NJ, facility. His main assignments are the infrastructure/middleware components of the AEGIS Weapons System.  In addition, as of September 2007, Jim is in his fourth year of law school at Rutgers-Camden, graduating this May.  Working during the day and going to classes in the evenings has been rough at times, but Jim can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Jim is planning to go into patent law, since his CS background gives him an opportunity that most attorneys don't have.  Jim’s goal is to move back to North Carolina after graduation, possibly in the Research Triangle area, but he might end up anywhere in the country.

After graduation, Rob first worked at COXnet in the Special Projects team as a Software Developer for the Cox Newspapers' websites. He then started a job as a Senior Analyst at CondeNast Publications in New York City within their CondeNet division (within yet another Special Projects team), which includes Epicurious.com, Concierge.com, Reddit.com, NutritionData.com,Style.com, Men.Style.com, Wired.com, & Flip.com.  His biggest project at COXnet was a media sharing application called MediaHub.  You can see implementations of it at  ohsnap.daytondailynews.com.

Since graduating, Omar has moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he is working in private equity on leveraged buyouts and infrastructure projects at Abraaj Capital throughout the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia region.  As of September 2007, he’s working on the portfolio management team in and out of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.  Omar says he really enjoys what he’s doing.  His fiancé will join him after they get married in July of 2008.  Omar and his friends launched a non-profit in January of 2005, Youth Outreach, Developments in Literacy, through which they build schools in underprivileged areas of Pakistan.   They have expanded the organization to include six cities in the United States.

Since graduating from Wake Forest in 2003, Matthew has been in graduate school in computer science. He received an MS from The College of William and Mary in 2005 and expects to get his PhD from Virginia Tech in 2008. His dissertation work has been focused in the area of high performance computing, with an emphasis on improving energy efficiency in this context. This work has been published in various conferences and journals, allowing Matthew to travel to places like Italy and Australia to present his work. He also pursued his research over the summer of 2007 as a Computation Technical Scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Matthew got married in October 2006 to Jen, whom he met at W&M.

After graduation, Amy started out working for Williamson County Public Schools in Franklin, TN, as a Data Warehouse Specialist. She was responsible for creating, maintaining and training the school principals on a data warehouse that held all of Williamson County's assessment data. When she was hired, most of the data was in paper form, but by the time she left there was a system in place that allowed the principals to access, organize, and disseminate the data securely through a web browser. What she enjoyed most about the position was training and working with the principals. That set her up well for her next position, which would depend heavily on her ability to interact with people. After working at the school system, Amy worked at Vanderbilt Medical Center as a Computer Systems Analyst for Perioperative Systems Support. She provided 24-hour support to troubleshoot issues reported by clinicians and surgeons. She loved the experience of wearing scrubs and being able to help and support the clinicians, surgeons and anesthesiologists during their surgeries. Most recently, Amy has been working at Duke University Office of Information Technology (OIT) as their Student Computing Coordinator while her husband Ty (class of 2002) attends Duke to get his MBA. Amy is responsible for managing the undergraduate and graduate students who work for OIT and also works as project manager for a whole range of tasks. Currently, she has 50 student employees who work in varying roles across the campus. She loves working with university students, helping them access and use the technology resources that Duke offers.

After exiting the Calloway Building in 2002 with his Bachelor's in CS, Bob Akers moved 100 yards up the road and began work on his Master's degree at the Babcock Graduate School of Management. Two years later, he completed his MBA with concentrations in Operations and IT Management. The diploma hanging proudly upon his office wall states that he graduated "with distinction"--however, he claims that this was a misprint. In the Summer of 2004, Akers relocated to Charleston, WV, where he has since embarked upon numerous and sundry adventures. For two years, he and a fellow MBA graduate operated a web design firm; in 2006, Akers sold his share of the company to focus on improving his townhouses (bobsvillas.com), which promise to be Charleston's premiere rentals within five years if he can repair all the roofs and HVAC systems without first going bankrupt. Throughout his time in West Virginia, Akers has been employed by Union Mission (wefeedpeople.com), a Charleston-based non-profit that feeds more than 60,000 needy people throughout West Virginia. Akers currently (September 2007) serves as Director of Development. His official responsibilities include fundraising and public relations; however, he also manages the organization's computer network and is currently developing a web-based case management system. 

Mason was the winner of the Sawyer Prize for computer science in 2002.  After graduating in 2002, he moved to San Francisco to work for Kemper Insurance.  After one year (and probably not because of Mason), the company closed its doors, and Mason returned to Durham, NC.  For the next few years, he attended graduate school in computer science at Duke University and ran his own business, Matthews Systems, which provided home computer support.  In July of 2004, he married Lucia Runestad, another Wake Forest graduate, who works in the childcare industry.  He completed his Master’s degree in computer science in December 2006, and has since been working with SciMed Solutions in Durham, NC, as the lead of its web development team.

Ty has been happily married for over four years to Amy Webb (formerly Amy Rueth of the Wake Forest CS class of 2003). As of October 2007, they live in Durham, NC and have no children. Ty worked as a software engineer from 2002-2006 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. The application on which he worked was a computerized physician order entry system (CPOE) system. He worked daily with physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators trying to make the delivery of care to the patients safer and more efficient. Last year, Ty returned to North Carolina to get his MBA at Duke. He will graduate in Spring 2008 with concentrations in finance and marketing with a specialization in Health Sector Management. Amy and Ty would like to return to Nashville, have a few children, and continue the life they started there a few years ago. 

After graduating in 2001, Jeremy moved to Bloomington, IN, and married Jennifer McCarthy (also a WFU alum).  While in Bloomington, Jeremy was employed by the American Indian Studies Research Institute of Indiana University.  Danny joined the family in 2003, and the family moved to Fowlerville, MI, in the middle of 2004.  Jeremy worked as a photographer and freelance web programmer while in Michigan.  In early 2006, Jeremy and Jenny moved back to Winston-Salem, when Jeremy started work as a System Administrator for Wake Forest University.  They welcomed Timothy to the family in January 2007.

After graduation, John travelled to El Paso, Texas where he served for five years in the US Army as an officer in a Patriot Missile Battalion. During that time, he travelled to a number of different places without using his passport, deployed at different times to Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Kuwait, and Iraq. While he was in Iraq, he served as a liaison officer to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in the Green Zone. After he got out of the Army, he moved back to his hometown of Charlottesville, VA, bought a house, and got married. He’s currently (September 2007) working at Elder Research, Inc. as a programmer/analyst, where he has the opportunity to work on lots of exciting and interesting problems like the Netflix prize problem. 

As of September 2007, Jeremy is living in Winston-Salem, where he works remotely as a program manager for Yardi Systems (www.yardi.com), the industry leader in property management software.  He specifically focuses on real estate appraisal and investment management software and works with teams in Pune, India, Amsterdam, and Australia.  Jeremy is married to a graduate student who's currently wrapping up a PhD in molecular genetics at Wake Forest University Medical Center.  They have two children:  Henry, age 4; and Harrison, 11 months old.

After graduation, Brian took a position with IBM in the Research Triangle Park, working in their newly-created Java programming group under the Tivoli set of products.  About three years later, Yaorong Ge, a former computer science faculty member at Wake Forest, contacted Brian  about a company he was helping startup back in Winston-Salem.  Moving back to town allowed Brian to hold season tickets for Wake Forest basketball and football, so he couldn't resist.  He became the first full-time engineer hire of PointDx, a medical software company focusing on radiology reporting and 3D image rendering.  Over four years, the company developed several iterations of their product, demonstrated it at trade shows, and made a few waves in the industry.  At the end of 2005, the company was bought out by IDX, a larger medical software company, which was itself bought out by GE Medical a few months later.  GE opted to close the Winston-Salem office (announced on Brian’s 30th birthday in fact!).  Luckily, Brian immediately found a good situation with Noregon Systems, a local company that creates hardware and software for the automotive and transportation industries.  He has been with them since, holding a Technical Lead position (which means more Project Manager than Programmer).  Over these years, Brian did a lot of traveling for both fun and business.  He twice had the opportunity to attend the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, and every year with PointDx he and his colleagues attended the RSNA conference in Chicago (unfortunately during the first week in December).  Another CS grad, Charlie Benson, did contract work in various locations overseas for several years, and provided Brian with free lodging for trips to London.  A few years ago, Brian was back on the Wake Forest campus picking up tickets for a Homecoming game, when he ran into an old classmate on the quad, Meghna Baliga, who had also moved back to Winston-Salem (to pursue her PhD in Biology at Wake).  The rest, as they say, is history.  They celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary in August 2007, going to Munich for their honeymoon.