We at USDemocrazy are getting alot of mixed signals from polticians and pundits regarding the Affordable Care act.

Is it a socialist program that will bankrupt the country? A welcome first step toward badly needed Universal care?

We’re not sure. So as college age students have been a big target of the health care media barrage, we would like to know your thoughts.

How would you would describe Obamacare?

See if you can condense your thoughts and opinions into 140 characters and write it below. We will add our thoughts to the mix in the days ahead.

Extra points if you can deliver your message in Haiku.

Check out these numbers…

$53.4 million: Combined salaries of the 15 highest-paid college football coaches.

$0: Combined salaries of 450,000 Division I college athletes.

Is there a problem with this?

If you follow college football, chances are you’ve heard of Johnny Manziel, the sophomore star quarterback for Texas A&M. He’s slowly becoming a household name at the young age of 20, but despite the rising fame, Johnny Manziel has yet to make a dollar playing football…apparently.

The debate over paying student athletes was restarted when Manziel was under investigation for accepting payments for signing autographs. In an unclear verdict, Manziel was given a half-game suspension, and the allegations were dropped.

Since Texas A&M earned $120M from the football team in 2012 ( yes, you read that right…$120 MILLION) and received $37M in free media exposure, many people are questioning the ethics of not paying athletes. Some are even going to the extremes of calling it indentured servitude.

Texas coach Mack Brown states,

“I do think players need to be paid. These players are killing themselves, and at Texas last year, we made $163 million.”

On the other hand, Brit Kirwan, chancellor at University of Maryland system, says

“The huge TV contracts and excessive commercialization have corrupted intercollegiate athletics. To some extent they have compromised the integrity of the universities.”

Manziel jerseys have sold for $60 and someone even paid $20,000 for dinner with him, but poor Johnny will see none of that money. Granted, Manziel is attending school for free with the best facilities and resources available.

Are scholarships enough compensation for the athletes? Or should the NCAA, National Collegiate Athletic Association, start allowing stipends for athletes who help bring in money for the school? 

Story from: http://alexeymk.com/a-brief-guide-to-tech-internships/

Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, 

No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company.

Wait, who are you?

I'm a CS senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I have interned at Facebook (Summer 2010), where I worked on application privacy, and as a generalist at 2bkco (Summer 2011), a new startup from serial enterpreneur Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch).  Both internships were great and invaluable. They were also very, very different, in terms of both the type of work I had to do and what I gained from the experience.

1) How do I get a good internship?

Luckily, a number of great posts have been written about this subject already.

• Andrew Munn has a great piece on interviewing and applying for tech internships, focusing primarily on what larger companies are looking for.
• Gayle Laakmann, author of Cracking the Coding Interview, has a post on the difference between what startups and tech companies are looking for.

To which I add my two cents:

• Start thinking about summer internships around Winter Break. Make a list of potential companies and start applying.  Don't be worried if the entire process takes until April or so, though.
• Get a referral rather than applying directly whenever possible.   Ask upperclassmen you know (think: TAs that like you) who could make a referral.  For earlier-stage companies, if they don't have an explicitly-listed referral program, don't worry about it: email the CEO. Hint: they are probably at firstname@startup.com.
• Practice technical interviews. If you're nervous about writing code on the whiteboard, try some combination of being drilled by upperclassmen, buying (and practicing going through) Gayle's Cracking the Coding Interview. Others also recommend interviewing with the companies you aren't as interested in first, using them to train.
• Optimize for what you can get. Bigger companies are going to (generally) look for a high GPA and good performance on brain teasers.  Smaller companies are going to prioritize a history of initiative and automony, as shown by cool projects on your resume.  If you've got a high GPA (at least 3.7 at Penn, say) and are good at brain teasers, you should be OK with larger companies; if not, start with a start-up.
• Your timing is great! Literally everybody is looking for software engineers right now, and internships are one of the key ways to recruit for companies. The market could not be any better for us. If you feel like you're not getting anywhere, make sure to apply beyond whatever is immediately available on campus. Competing with the general populace may be easier than competing with others at your university.
• Consider a mass-application or 'summer program', which are often offered by venture capital firms and have gained popularity in recent years.  Make sure to check out (and potentially apply via): hackNY fellows,Andreesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Fellows, Bane's StartUp Academy, NYC Turing Fellows, InterviewStreet and InternMatch. None of these are a substitute for applying to companies individually (and I haven't tried them myself) but given the reasonably short time required to apply, they are probably worth doing.
• Location is a pretty big deal. Try to be in the Bay Area (Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc) if you can - it's awesome. and there are a ton of other interns around.  I hear New York is getting pretty fun as well, but don't have any personal experience. Other tech regions like Boston or Austin (and maybe LA and Philly) aren't bad, but make sure not to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, living in the suburbs as the only tech intern at a huge company.  That does not a fun summer make.

2) How do I pick where to apply/work?

Before applying, consider: "Am I excited about the products this company makes? Would I be excited to know that I work there?" It's much easier to get motivated (and show excitement) for a company you are excited about. I was Dropbox user #2001, which I did not neglect to mention when I applied. It helped. I think.

I strongly advice looking for internships with a big tech company or a startup, rather than a non-tech company (esp. financial) company that happens to have engineers. The explanation is a little long, so I'll just assume you nod along hummingly here. For the inquisitive: here's a longer argument.

Picking a startup
You want to work for (and learn from) the start-ups that are going to be successful, but as the Venture Capital industry knows full well, it's not always easy to pick winners.

There are, however, a few hints that you can pick up on and prioritize for when thinking about where to work:

• Has the founder had a successful start-up venture in the past? They must have done something right; past performance appears to be the best guarantor of success for tech enterpreneurs.
• Is the founder (or a large portion of the founding team) technical? Are they writing code? Do they come from a strong technical background, whether at a startup or from a top tech company?
• Does the company or its employees have a track record of being good mentors?  I wrote a Mentorship Checklist: questions worth asking to find out.
• Is the company pre or post "product-market fit?"  That is, are they figuring out what the heck it is that they are going to do that makes money, or have they figured it out and are trying to scale and make sure the servers don't melt with all the new traffic?  Both are exciting times in the life of a start-up; consider a pre-product market fit company if you're looking to get a big opportunity to contribute creatively and try new things, and a product-market fit company if you are interested in the technical challenge of quickly scaling a codebase.
• Is this a 'well known' startup? One of the downsides about working at a startup is that it doesn't usually yield the brand recognition of a 'Facebook' or a 'Google' on your resume. Working at a small company people have heard of (TechCrunch coverage/Twitter buzz being a reasonable proxy for 'heard of') helps negate that. Think (again) Quora, Path, Uber, Square, etc - small teams but well-known products.

Picking between larger companies

• The easiest way to figure out if a larger company is worth working for is by their reputation: ask upperclassmen, friends and professors.  
• Does the company have an official internship program? Does it sound awesome? Can you speak to somebody (ideally from your school, but from the company if not) who has been through the program as an intern? Talk about both intern housing and make sure to run through the Mentorship Checklist.
• Sites like glassdoor.com, which offer anonymous feedback from employees, a tremendously useful service as you try to figure out if this is one of those 'magical companies'. The sample size is not large enough to use for companies smaller than a few hundred employees, unfortunately.
• It's not always immediately clear whether a company is or is not a 'tech company' - Amazon and Barnes and Noble both sell books online and have e-readers available, but (from my intuition) Amazon is a tech company that happens to sell books on-line, whereas B&N is a book retailer that has been forced online and into e-readers by the prevailing winds of change. Which one sounds more fun to work at?
• One sign of an innovative company is a technical or product person in the CEO role - think of Larry Page's involvement with Google products compared to somebody like Lowell McAdam (who?) at Verizon.  It's more fun to work for a culture trying to build the future than one trying to maximize this quarter's revenues and 'maximize shareholder value.'
• In general, newer companies will have less middle-management cruft and set-in-their-wayedness than older ones.  There are some older companies with solid programs, like IBM's Extreme Blue, and some newer companies with terrible reputations I would advise against.

3) What you learn
(or at least what I learned)

In short, working with top technical people will teach you software engineering 'done right' (IE, no more turning in ugly code for your homework assignment that is going to be auto-graded once and then filed away forever). That means different things at earlier and later stage companies, though, and I can only relate my experience.

What I learned at Facebook
First and foremost, I learned to write 'good code'. My first non-trivial commit (15 lines or so) was rejected 6 or 7 times until I finally put the right amount of spacing in an "if (" and fixed my trailing whitespace. These were important, brilliant engineers politely telling an intern, time and time again, something that he should have found in the coding guidelines doc. I've been a little bit embarrased to show a lot of my pre-Facebook code, as a result - the improvement, at least for me, was significant. 

In general, the experience taught me that Code is Culture. The fact that top FB engineers were willing to spend so much of their time on code reviews was a fantastic way to show-not-tell Facebook's commitment to good code. I can't say that I've been able to pay the overhead of 100% code reviews on every project or team I've worked on since, but having the background of working in a 'code quality matters' team has infused the way I think about programming today.

I also learned that engineers are not immune to politics, even at great companies. I was playing around with a hackathon improvement to one of the sharing features, but the engineer who understood most of the code would not reply to my emails for weeks and claimed he was busy (which he was) when I walked over to his desk. My original pitch for the feature I wanted to work on was "You know what sucks about Facebook? X.  We should fix it." In retrospect, I did not do nearly a good enough job of trying to get the person on board or show respect for the work that had already been done.

What I learned at 2bkco
I joined the team several weeks after the engineering work had begun. It was very humbling to see the ease with which Eric would put together a component and then decide, several days later, that there was a better way to do something and throw it all away. When you know your code has a good chance of being thrown away, the priority becomes writing quickly in a way that can be cleaned up later (which is different than writing sloppily or writing 'homework' code).

I also got a lot of training in breadth: 2bkco required me to be close-enough to fluent in Javascript (Coffeescript), Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS. It was too early in the life of the company for me to specialize, which meant a lot of time on Google and StackOverflow, learning how to do a ton of things as I went. I became much more comfortable forking Github projects of things that did sort of what I wanted.

Our PHA Woman of the Month for October is Erin Wells!

Erin is Phi Sigma Sigma's PHA delegate & Centennial/35th anniversary chair. 
Erin is a junior environmental science major, who is not only involved with PhiSig, but is a part of Students for Environmental Awareness, and takes on many roles to enhance her academics. Last year, as a sophomore, Erin was a Sustainability Intern for SGA in which she worked with other interns, faculty, and staff to promote sustainability on campus. She contributed to events like Eco week and Recyclemania. This summer, Erin conducted research through the International Field research program looking at sustainable waste management on an international level with a focus on college campuses. Erin conducted a "greenness audit" of UMBC's campus and University of Bern's campus during her time abroad in Switzerland. This summer and continuing this semester, Erin is a lab assistant in Chris Swan's ecology lab on campus. She is currently working on her own research project, which examines the effects of aquashade, a water dye, on an ecosystem. In addition, Erin loved helping the freshman get adjusted to moving into UMBC as a Woolie during Welcome Week.
Erin is passionate about everything she is involved in. She is organized and an excellent communicator between PHA and PhiSig. Erin's positivity is inspiring. Even with a million things on her plate, she always has a smile on her face and cheers up those around her. She is someone who is always there for her sisters and would do anything for her PHA friends and the UMBC Greek community. Erin Wells was voted PHA Woman of the Month because of her involvement on campus and her overall friendly and compassionate nature. 
Congratulations!

UMBC’s CyberDawgs placed second at the 2013 Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) finals that were held in Baltimore on October 9 as part of the CyberMaryland 2013 conference.

CyberDawgs-1 (pictured above) included William Thomas, Anthony Sasadeusz, Kenneth Johansen Jorge Teixeira, AJ Hallameyer, and Fahad Alduraibi.

During the finals, teams competed in a Control-the-Flag event where they attempted to gain (and maintain) control of other systems on the network – which were also being targeted by other teams seeking to gain and ‘own’ them as well.

All of UMBC’s three CyberDawg teams competed vigorously throughout the MDC3 season and maintained a very tight scoring situation for the college division. However, by taking second place in today’s finals, each member of CyberDawgs-1 will receive a $2,000 cash prize provided by the National Security Agency.

CSEE’s Dr. Richard Forno and Dr. Charles Nicholas are faculty advisors to the team.  UMBC is a co-founder of the Maryland Cyber Challenge.