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Graduating Mudders entering the workforce are so in-demand that sometimes the only way a desperate company recruiter can get them is by sneaking up from behind, bopping them on the crown with a club and then dragging them off by their hair to an awaiting place of employment.
Exaggeration? Yes, of course. But not by much. The fact is, even during times of recession, Mudders are prize commodities in the business and professional worlds. The luckiest of them go to work for Mudder alumni—lucky because companies owned or administered by HMC graduates tend to be great places to develop one’s career.
Take, for example, the venture launched by computer science majors Josh Jones ’98, Sage Weil ’00, Dallas Bethune Kashuba ’97, and Michael Rodriguez ’98, while they were still in school. Their DreamHost.com—a low-cost web-hosting provider based in Los Angeles—is today a thriving and thoroughly hip enterprise with more than 200,000 paid-up customers across California and beyond. In short, a great place to work. To keep pace with growth, DreamHost expanded its staff with five fresh faces —Mudders all—and this summer opened its doors to six interns. (Even the company’s outside attorney is a Mudder: Joel Voelzke ’83.)
“The Mudders we hire are found mainly through HMC’s career fair and Career Office,” says Jones, indicating that, once assigned a desk, the newcomers are put to work on general development projects. “We’ve written our entire web-hosting system ourselves, so there’s plenty to do in terms of adding new features, automating existing processes, fixing bugs and so forth. Some of our Mudders are also helping with our new open-source distributed file system, which started out as Sage’s doctoral project.”
Aptitude For Success
Like Josh, Yen Pham ’91, has made good use of Mudd’s Career Services. The founder and president of Link4 Corp. in Placentia says he prefers employing recent Mudd graduates over those from other schools because “they’re high-caliber individuals who come to us in possession of a very well-rounded engineering education. That’s important because, as a small organization, we’re very dependent on our ability to acquire new knowledge and skill in a tremendously short time frame. Mudders tend to thrive in this type of environment.”
Link4 is a tech company focused on environmental controls and greenhouse automation. Says Pham, “We’re doing well, despite the current market condition. Our rapid growth is due in part to good strategic planning—we anticipated this global downturn and took action to prepare for it. Fortunately, we’re small and nimble enough that we can adapt quickly to changing winds.”
Mudders employed at Link4 include Danny La Valle ’07 and Eric Burkhart ’08. “Even though Danny and Eric are just at the beginning of their careers, they already serve as key product development engineers on all of our projects,” says Pham. “Their responsibilities include not only the development of embedded software, but also hardware design and interaction with customers.”
Relationships Vital
Another way Pham finds out about Mudders who might make a good fit for his company is by networking with HMC alumni from his own class and those from previous and successive ones. Networking also has been good for Link4’s growth prospects generally. “It’s given us essential access to people who have helped us make savvy business decisions as well as overcome engineering hurdles,” says Yen, who is involved with faith-based groups that foster invaluable relationships as well.
Jones asserts that his own company would not exist were it not for networking. “Networking on campus as students brought the four of us business partners together and got us talking about starting our hosting services,” he says.
Amanda Malone ’02 is similarly keen about networking. She is vice president and director of research and development for Auritec Pharmaceuticals, a small R&D company in Pasadena that investigates methods for easier, safer, more efficacious delivery of FDA-approved drugs to the human body. “Relationships with people are vital to career advancement,” she says, adding that she learned this early on. “It was through personal relationships that I made the connection that led to my current job. And, when looking for new talent, I’ve made a point of communicating with the people I know at Mudd for referrals.”
Those people include professors as well as the staff of Mudd Career Services. Over the years, they’ve helped Malone build an impressive team (which, notably, consists almost exclusively of women). “I’ve chosen to hire people from Mudd because I know what a great education HMC offers and how hard-working its students need to be in order to be successful,” she explains. “I think that, as Mudd’s network of alumni continues to grow, more and more companies will want to hire Mudd students.”
Malone said she intends to remain plugged into that network—and into the school’s job candidate-generating pipeline. “All I ask of HMC is that they keep promoting the connection between graduates and the current student population and Career Services.”
She knows a winning formula when she sees one. 
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