Wednesday, June 11, 2014

[621] Web giant Google taps MTSU computer science for new hires

MURFREESBORO — Nathan
Reale and Matt Houglum are the latest alumni from MTSU and its computer science
program to tap the career pipeline to Web service giant Google.

In April and May, respectively, the students-turned-alumni
learned they had landed full-time positions with Google Inc., the American
multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and
products. They began their careers at Google locations in California and
Washington state in June.

“It is very difficult to get hired at Google, and the fact
that a major company like Google is hiring our students is indicative of the
quality of the education being offered in the Department of Computer Science at
MTSU,” said Chrisila Pettey, professor and department chair.

With 12 faculty members, 375 students and housed on the
third floor of 113-year-old Kirksey Old Main, computer science flies under the
radar compared to signature programs such as recording industry and aerospace,
which is part of the College of Basic and Applied Sciences along with computer
science.

Google hires register on everyone’s radar.

Reale, 24, of Franklin, Tennessee, and Houglum, 24, of
Christiana, Tennessee, will be joining computer science alumni Collin Winter
and Micah Chasteen as Google employees. Eldridge Alexander, a 2012 graduate
from the College of Mass Communication, also works for Google in Ann Arbor,
Michigan.

Chasteen, who has worked for Google for two years, spoke to
the computer science student organization in February.

“His topic was getting a job with IT companies, but mostly
Google. I applied the next day,” said Reale, adding that “Google was my dream
job from high school through college.”

Reale will work on Google projects at its Mountain View,
California, headquarters outside San Francisco. He and Alexander also are
former Buchanan Fellows and graduates of the University Honors College. He had
a 4.0 GPA in grad school and 3.9 as an undergraduate, majoring in computer
science and math.

Houglum will be an enterprise technical solutions engineer
at Google’s Seattle operations, “solving technical problems people and
companies have when they begin using Google products,” he said, admitting, too,
it “has kind of been a dream job for me.”

At MTSU, Houglum participated on a student team that
developed an Android mobile app for students to provide easy access to a wide
variety of university information and, along with Reale, helped with student
systems administration responsibilities as grad students.

Houglum said the MTSU student systems administration
experience is what sold Google recruiters on him, and his advice to current
students: Go to grad school.

Reale and Houglum earned their bachelor’s degrees at MTSU,
too. Both participated in the MTSU ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
student chapter.

“They are all
very talented computer scientists who are willing to spend the extra time it
takes to stay ahead of the curve in a constantly changing field,” Pettey said.

The Google hires and the hiring of current graduate student
Alex Williams by an Oxford research team in England are propelling computer
science to a loftier status.

For more information about MTSU’s computer science program,
visit http://www.mtsu.edu/csc/ or
call 615-898-2397.