Tuesdays, 1:30-2:20, CSE 305
Instructors: Ed Lazowska / Dan Grossman
A one-credit (CR/NC) seminar series

Intent

The UW CSE Leadership Seminar Series, CSE 390L, is a one-credit (CR/NC) seminar series, primarily targeted at upper-division CSE undergraduates, that brings CSE alumni and friends to campus to describe how to be effective in a startup, small company, large company, or less common environment. Our guests will discuss topics such as:

• How do you position yourself to work on interesting projects?
• In a large company, what strategies can make you influential, vs. a cog in a wheel?
• What is life like in a startup?
• If your goal is to start and grow your own company, where do you begin?
• What are the pros and cons of less common career options, such as teaching high school computer science?
• What do you need to know in order to succeed, that you don't learn in your classes or during an internship?
• Why might you choose graduate school vs. tech industry employment after graduation?

Course requirements

Regular attendance, active participation. Please read up on the individual and his/her employer(s) in advance of each course session.

Course email archive

Send email to course members by using the address cse390l_wi16 at uw.edu.

The archive of email is available here.

The lineup

• Recent grads doing what most of you probably imagine yourselves doing - working in Seattle for great companies such as Facebook, Redfine, Socrata, and Google
• An alum only 9 years out who's at his 4th company - as CEO and Co-Founder
• A Ph.D. student who moved to industry research
• A B.S. student who enrolled in a Ph.D. program but left with an M.S. and is on his second job with a leadership company
• Sibling B.S. alums who received Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT and moved to industry, one as a Founder and CEO
• A B.S. alum who runs Uber Seattle after a number of years with Isilon, but is prevented by nepotism rules from hiring his younger brother, also a UW CSE B.S. alum, from Google
• A B.S. alum who after time at Amazon and Google is now helping the US Government sortout its IT "issues"
• A B.S. alum with an MIT Ph.D. who leads a major Facebook Android team
• A Special Forces soldier who after his UW B.S. moved to Socrata
• A B.S. alum who is in her 12th year at Amazon. (Don't take the New York Times at face value on this!)

Tuesdays, 1:30, CSE 305

Date	Room	Guest(s)	Experience
January 5	CSE 305	Panel of young alums:     Jenny Abrahamson, 2012 UW CSE B.S., 2013 M.S.     Stephanie Smallman, 2010 U.W. CSE B.S.     Clint Tseng, 2010 UW CSE B.S.     Tariq Yusuf, 2014 UW CSE B.S.	These alums are (or were until recently) individual contributors at:     Facebook     Egraphs -> Redfin     Socrata     Google
January 12	CSE 305	Jason Tan, 2006 UW CSE B.S. Slides (pdf)	Zillow -> Optify -> BuzzLabs (CTO) -> Sift Science (CEO & Co-Founder)
January 19	CSE 305	AJ Brush, 1998 UW CSE M.S., 2002 Ph.D. Slides (pdf)	Microsoft Research
January 26	CSE 305	Sunil Garg, 2010 UW CSE B.S.	Georgia Tech M.S. -> Amazon -> Uber
February 2	CSE 305	Jon Su, UW CSE B.S. 2006 Sara Su, UW CSE B.S. 2002 Slides (pdf)	Stanford Ph.D. -> Intel -> PhiSix Fashion Labs (Founder & CEO) -> eBay MIT Ph.D. -> Tufts -> Google
February 9	CSE 305	Tim Prouty, UW CSE B.S. 2006	Isilon Systems -> EMC Isilon -> EMC -> Uber (Head of Seattle Software Engineering)
February 16	CSE 305	Albert Wong, UW CSE B.S. 2004 Slides (pdf)	Amazon -> Google -> United States Digital Service
February 23	CSE 305	Jenny Yuen, UW CSE B.S. 2006 Slides (pdf) 5-minute related Sheryl Sandberg video	MIT Ph.D. -> Facebook
March 1	CSE 305	Mike Hotan, UW CSE B.S. 2013, M.S. 2014 Slides (pdf)	Socrata
March 8	CSE 305	Margaux Eng, UW CSE B.S., 2004 Slides (pdf)	Amazon