Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Information Session’

Originally posted on Friday, November 5, 2008

Ruby: ATI Mascot Girl

I went to the AMD session today for PEY. The whole process was pretty exciting. AMD is pretty much the biggest employer for PEY, as they offer more than a hundred jobs for PEY students from UofT. Basically, if I just randomly chose jobs to submit applications for, and went through the PEY process that way, chances are I’d land myself in an AMD job.

And it’s not a bad company either. I’m sure pretty much anyone who has even the smallest interest in computer/silicon technology has heard of them. If not, well, have you heard of Intel, the company behind the Pentium-4 Processors or Core 2 Duo? AMD is their direct competition. My computer runs on an AMD chip, and I’m willing to bet that half of the computer packages at Best Buy also run on AMD processors. This is also not the only fame you’ll get with AMD. Since 2006 they’ve combined with ATI, the maker of Radeon graphic cards, and it seems that lots of work with ATI cards are done here in Toronto, in their Markham office.

I like their perspective towards PEY. See, since they’re such an old partner with the PEY program, they’re familiar with what it is. Also, since they hire so many students per year for many years already, they’re familiar with the amount of skill and knowledge we have. At the session, we had the chance to talk to the managers and members of each of their design teams that will hire. They were all very amazing people. Some of the people are current PEY students, and from the way they talk and the amount of knowledge and skills they hold, it’s hard to think that a year ago, they were just students like us. Though, I should probably also keep in mind that they hired more than a hundred people last year, and the people who showed up at the meeting were only a handful, so I was probably seeing the best of them.

Even so, they’ve done more than just show their knowledge and maturity. On top of that, they’ve demonstrated and made it clear that the path for students like us to grow is perfectly open. They’ve told us about the challenges the job will pose, but if they conquered such challenges, then why shouldn’t we? They offer a goal, and they offer resources. We can shine too; we just need to be smart and work hard.