Holden Malinchock

Holden Malinchock

I graduated from Freedom High School in 2016. I went to George Mason University to study Computer Science and graduated in May 2020.

During my sophomore year of high school I was suggested by my Counselor to take a class called computer math. I absolutely loved it and the teacher, Mrs. Cossa was fantastic. I knew after taking that course that this was the career path I wanted to go. I went on to take AP computer science and loved that as well. Mrs. Cossa was so great to me and I showed passion for the topic, so much so that she offered me a TA position for Computer Math my Senior year. I gladly accepted this and my senior year I also applied to take classes once a week at GMU after High School (During the Day). I wanted to take more CS classes my senior year but Freedom didn't have anymore so I decided to go to GMU my senior year to try to get a class. Unfortunately the early level classes were so full the best I could get was a Game Design class. It wasn't CS but it gave me a trial run for college before I got there which was super valuable to me and helped me succeed my freshman year since I understood expectations.

I chose to not work during my college classes mainly since CS being an extremely difficult and time consuming degree. But what I did was every summer of College search for an internship. I was told the best way to get a Job was having internships and the real world experience you get from real internships would be a leg up on other graduates with my degree. So that's what I did, every summer of College I gave up vacation time (Relaxing at home) to work at an internship doing software engineering. Getting one internship at Neustar my first summer and all summers and winter breaks after that I interned at Praxis Engineering.

These internships were extremely helpful not just to increase my knowledge base for when I graduated, but for the fact that one internship with a company had a contingent offer on my graduation. This contingent offer was assuming I did good work in the internship. I should also note these were paid internships which is much easier in the software field to get but certainly was a nice bonus.

Finally during my senior year of College in the first semester of senior year the career fairs started so went to a career fair to hand out my resume and get my name on peoples desks. Having offers could help me negotiate my salary worth.

I got a few bites and one of them was from a company called Verisign. I was called in for first round interviews and impressed the interviewers with my experience using systems they used, I got this experience from internships I did, proving them to be directly useful. Then second round interviews went well for the same reason. I was offered a job from Verisign shortly after this and after some thought and negotiating I accepted the offer before my first semester was over.

I then graduated in May 2020 and immediately started working for Verisign. They are a terrific company and I have been working for them for 9 months now.