Life After College:

An Interview with Michael Tighe

Life after college is a completely different experience than what anyone is used to. It’s the jungle in the real world with no one to take care and baby you. There is no one that will take care of you but you in the real world. That was the biggest take away from my interview with Michael Tighe. Michael Tighe is a web developer at the company Founders located in Newark, New Jersey. He attended the College of Staten Island(CSI)  for 5 years where he graduated with a degree in computer science. Even before his freshman year at CSI Michael had always had an interest in coding. It was after his freshman year that he started to realize that he wanted to do it as a career and made it his focus throughout his college career.

His first job that involved his major was also his first internship. Michael was a tutor and as well as a teacher’s assistant at CSI. There he helped teach undergraduates about coding and guided them one on one when they needed help individually. He got both through the campus as teachers were looking for interns that had experience in the field. He got experience with deadlines and working within a timespan when he had to grade tests. He explained how college doesn’t teach you how to deal with these things and it is because of these experiences that he became better at these situations.

Michaels second job and his most recent one is being a web developer at Founders from December 2017 to May of 2018.. Founders is a startup web development company that is located in Newark.   Michael was hired by Founders through Linkedin. He applied online and went through the interview process and training to later work at the company. The training made him learn the basics of html, CSS, java script, and react. Once he finished training he started to design web pages with a other web developers on a daily basis.

His day to day activities were very standard and organized. In the morning, his team was in a scrum call which laid out what they were going to do that day. It was mostly about how to maintain and create web pages for specific companies. He explains how it sometimes got extremely hectic nearing the deadlines. Sometimes he would have something due in a week and it was up to him if he could complete the task. You couldn’t say yes to everything and not be able to complete it before the deadline, but at the same time you can’t say no because you can’t do it because you don’t want to do it. “You have to be realistic,” Michael explains, he had to use his best judgement on if he was capable or not in completing his task before the deadline.

At his work Michael had to constantly had to inform his superiors on the daily events that went on during his job. He had both morning and night scrum calls that lasted 15 minutes. In these calls he had to explain what went on during the day. He explains how he didn’t have to write often as he used github to send over all the code that was used during the day. Regardless, he was in contact with other engineers every single day and without communicating with them his job would not be as fluid as it could have been. Michael left the company late last year because of reasons that he did not want to disclose during the interview.

Some advice that he gave me during the end of the interview was getting into internships immediately. He tells how they really help you with getting real world experience that college doesn’t give you. He continues to explain how he wishes he had gotten into them earlier into his college career as they give you insight on how the world functions and the pace at which they function. He had to learn so much on the fly during his time working such as deadlines and it would be a while before he got used to it. He also gave some advice for coding. Michael tells how in the beginning he tried to just memorize everything, this method did not work very well with him. He continues with saying how it’s better to practice and understand everything so that you know why you’re doing it as well as how to do it.

Even after college Michael is still learning about the world and how it works. School doesn’t teach you about the world so it’s up to myself to learn about it now so that I may be prepared for anything that may get in my way.