From the small town of Bowie, Texas, Amanda Greenlee never thought she would end up with a career in the technology world. After graduation, Amanda will work for Rackspace, a San Antonio based cloud computing hosting company. She has already accepted an offer to work with them and she still has one semester of college left. Amanda, thankfully, is not worried about what her next big step after college is.
Did you always know you wanted to be a computer science major?
“Originally I planned on being pre-med, but I changed my mind and looked for something that was engineering related. I had always been interested in writing software growing up, but I didn’t have Internet at home or anything that I could learn from when I was in school. I really had no experience in programming prior to college. The closest I ever got to creating programs was making programs on a TI-83 calculator in my high school math class. I bought a book and taught myself to make small programs on my calculator that could do my math homework for me. “
Today, Amanda is expecting to graduate in May 2013 with a degree in Computer Science and two minors, one in Information Technology and the other in Math. She is also one of the student workers that help create new software programs for ACU. Having a job that complemented her school work and definitely impacted her application process in getting an internship at Rackspace during the past 2 summers that eventually led to a job offer.
However, it was not always easy.
“Balancing my school and work many times seemed to be overwhelming, but the faculty that was willing to work with me through all the tough material. It has been cool to have a bond with the professors outside the classroom. For example, Dr. Towell, computer science professor, invites all the students over once or twice a semester to just play games and hang out.”
Amanda like many other SITC students was able to travel with SITC faculty and fellow students to annual programming competitions. “Through participating in these competitions, I realized that web programming was what I wanted to have a career in,” Greenlee expressed.
What was your internship experience like at Rackspace?
“Rackspace has a very cool fun work environment. For the past two summers I worked as a software developer. During my first internship I helped designed an application for Rackspace’s internal use that worked with Google maps, where the employees within Rackspace would be able to find the location of the new offices within their building, as many additions and remodeling were made. This past summer I worked in developing a general application, where other applications can store data into a database, which enables easy query of the data. ”
Watch a video about Amanda’s internship experience here.
After finishing her 2012 internship, Amanda was offered the position of an Application Developer Level 1, where she will mostly be a java developer. It is an exciting beginning in her career, as Amanda will get to work with one of the companies known for their fun company culture.
What would you say to an incoming freshman?
“It’s been a fun and cool experience, the professors are great. Work hard and you can finish, motivation is necessary, but it is really rewarding. In the end you can end up with a really cool job.”
Thank you Amanda for being a part of the School of Information Technology and Computing. We wish you the best in your endeavors.