The results of the UMBC Homecoming Spirit Office Decorating Contest were revealed last night at the Faculty/Staff Social. More than 30 offices participated this year and the CSEE Department’s entry took first place in the Judge’s Choice category, which was based on site visits by a panel of judges from the UMBC alumni association, and third place in the People’s Choice category, which was determined by an online vote. The first place showing in the Judges Choice competition comes with a trophy and ten tickets to the Homecoming community picnic.

Congratulations to the CSEE staff for the great job of decorating the ITE325 suite for UMBC’s Homecoming. See pictures of their Maryland Beach Picnic themed display and stop by ITE325 during the rest of this week to experience the full multimedia effect and let the Department’s staff know what you think of their effort.

MD cyber security firm CEO wins Outstanding Alumni of the Year

By Denmark Luceriaga
Contributing Writer

The UMBC Alumni Association has selected Jeehye Yun (BS Computer Science, ’97) as the 2013 Outstanding Alumnus for Engineering and Information Technology. She will be presented with the award on October 10 at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library.

Yun is the founder and CEO of Secured Sciences Group, LLC (SSG), one of the many cyber incubator resident companies based in the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. With a goal of becoming a top-tier cyber security company, SSG’s mission is to help clients by offering world-class technology services and policy compliance management solutions.

SSG developed the compliance management software, Surveillant, that reduces the amount of information schools and businesses have to look at in government grant applications and contracts. This technology allows SSG to streamline the verification of a client’s policy compliance by eliminating redundancies in government applications. SSG makes life easier for their customers as they spend less time worrying about policy compliance.

Some features of Surveillant include recommending other policies that apply to the organization, tracking and managing evidence as proof of compliance, and tracking user activities and remediation. Along with compliance management, SSG also provides professional service in the areas of management support and information technology services.

As a member of bwtech@UMBC’s Cyber Incubator program, SSG utilizes business support services from bwtech@UMBC’s experienced entrepreneurial services team. Recently reaching full capacity, the incubator also provides office space, mentors, resources and collaborative opportunities for small startup companies like SSG. In 2012, SSG was a finalist in the Maryland Incubator of the Year Awards in the Cyber/Homeland Security category.

Along with other like-minded business in the program, Yun is attracting investors by bringing her company’s technology to mobile devices. SSG is taking advantage of its close proximity to federal agencies in Washington D.C. and is paralleling the growth of investment in the industry for security products for both government and commercial sectors.

After finishing her undergraduate degree in the late nineties, Yun taught a practical security course at UMBC, educating students about the practical aspects and pitfalls of security. She also worked with the Division of Information Technology as a systems programmer and administrator.

Before founding SSG, Yun served as Director of Computing Facilities at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) where she managed the teams supporting infrastructure of various research labs.

Continue reading at http://www.retrieverweekly.com/technology/md-cyber-security-firm-ceo-wins-outstanding-alumni-of-the-year-1.3075552#.Ulag5FPP6Sq

With so much going on in the industry, there is probably that one topic that you’d love to finally understand but never had time for. Or your company has a problem, and you aren’t sure how to address it? Well, we’ve got your back with a line-up of hands-on full-day workshops in London and Berlin — just for you.

Workshops in London, UK

	Visual Design Essentials by Dan Rubin Action and intent—that’s what the great designers focus on. In this workshop, you’ll learn techniques on how to manage the process, translate ideas into designs and even how to deliver a constructive critique. Read more…
	Responsive Design by Vitaly Friedman In this workshop, Vitaly will present practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies from real-life projects that you will definitely find quite useful when working on any responsive design project. Read more…
	The Front-End Warrior by Addy Osmani This is a workshop aimed at front-end intermediates who want to learn more about how modern front-end tooling can help save their time and improve (nay, automate) their front-end development workflow. Read more…
	Adaptive Interfaces by Aaron Gustafson By being flexible in our approach and embracing the unknown, we can create user experiences that are intended to vary from device to device, browser to browser, and network to network. Read more…

More workshops in London →

Workshops in Berlin, Germany

	Node.JS by Remy Sharp This workshop is a fully packed day of learning resources and exercises to get you quickly up and running with all the fundamentals you need to create your own Node.js-backed application. Read more…
	RWD Workflow by Stephen Hay This workshop is geared toward designers who aren’t afraid of stepping out of their comfort zone, as well as front-end developers who are heavily involved in the design process. Read more…
	Shipping Your Product by Rachel Andrew In this workshop you will learn from Rachel’s experience in launching a product, creating an action plan tailored to your own product idea, listing the things you will need to do to launch your own product, and more! Read more…
	Prototyping For Designers by Dan Rubin With the help of Dan’s workshop, you’ll learn how to prepare for and perform a basic usability test, and tips on how to incorporate testing into your existing design workflow. Read more…

More workshops in Berlin →

This isn’t the final list, though. Even more Smashing full-day workshops are underway — please stay tuned! It would be our great pleasure to personally meet you at one of the workshops. If you, your colleague, boss, relative, neighbor or anyone else has a question, feel free to drop us an email. We aren’t going anywhere, you know.

Cheers, and stay smashing!
Cat, Nadja, Jan & Markus

Front page image credits.

© Cat Clark for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

Summer is just past, and sadly this means that I’ll no longer be able to look up from my keyboard and out the window, only to come face to face with one of the season’s prettiest offerings — the butterfly.

While I might be tempted to argue that I find such beauty in these winged creatures strictly because of their dainty features and vibrant coloring, Gestalt principles tell me something else entirely: namely, that it’s their symmetry my eye finds so appealing.

Symmetry

Gestaltism — a human behavior theory that describes how the mind structures and arranges visual data — suggests that human beings naturally create order out of the things we see.

To put it another way, our eyes tend to crave completeness and organization. This brings us back to the idea of symmetry. By definition, there is a balanced, harmonious quality inherent in symmetry, and when it’s present in design the result is the kind of consistency, order, and stability that we find in some of the world’s most notable brands. It’s little wonder, then, that successful companies like Motorola, McDonald’s, and a myriad of car manufacturers employ symmetry in their logos. 

Motorola

McDonald’s

Mercedes-Benz

Toyota

Audi

Asymmetry

But while symmetry is aesthetically pleasing and even comforting, it also runs the risk of becoming too predictable. Asymmetry, by definition, lacks symmetry. It is characterized by imbalance and disorder, and this type of tension can be unsettling, but also profoundly interesting. Asymmetry tends to carry a kind of complexity that conveys emotion, from lighthearted and jovial to intense and moody, depending upon the execution.

YouTube

Nike

Facebook

Virgin

Gatorade

Symmetry vs. asymmetry in design

A skilled, intuitive designer should therefore give adequate attention to the subliminal connotations that a symmetrical versus asymmetrical design potentially carries for a client. Whether it’s a logo, a website, or other branding materials, the use of symmetry will naturally evoke a sense of calmness and orderliness; asymmetry, on the other hand, will tend to communicate excitement and risk.   

Consider two different versions of the Pepsi-Cola logo. Prior to 2008, the logo was symmetrical, with the red, white and blue swirls being horizontally and vertically balanced. The redesign, however, is the perfect example of asymmetry, with the red space considerably more dominant than the blue. 

Perhaps it could be argued that the switch from the “perfection” of the formerly symmetrical Pepsi logo to an asymmetrical, unbalanced version could be seen as indicative of a changing of the times. In years past, steady predictability and trustworthiness were paramount brand qualities. As culture evolves, excitement and edge — dare I say even a “coolness” factor — might be moving up on a brand’s priority list.

I’m struck by the similarity between the asymmetrical Pepsi swirl and the logo used by the Obama for President campaign. Like the cola company, the Obama logo employs asymmetry; but this is little wonder given that the President’s campaign presented itself as the “cool” choice. While his opponent, Mr. Romney, was seen as straight-laced and conservative, Mr. Obama was positioned as hip and trendy. Whether by design or not, his re-election logo bore this out. 

Either or Both

Ultimately, when it comes to designing a logo, a choice between symmetrical or asymmetrical inevitably must be made. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation in web design — both elements can be incorporated into the same website to serve different purposes. For example, use asymmetry to draw attention to a particular component and to convey movement. Employ symmetry for passive elements, such as backgrounds and navigations.  

The websites below are examples of how both elements can be used to create a successful design. Some rely heavily on one or the other, while many sites integrate symmetry and asymmetry for added impact.

Symmetrical

Form Follows Function

Buffalo

Asymmetrical

My Provence Festival

Will McMahan

Both

Etch

Aesthetic Apparatus

Conclusion

Overall, there is much to be gained from using both symmetry and asymmetry in the design process. While the eye craves the order that is found in symmetry, the visual impact of asymmetry also has significant uses.  It’s clear that the former communicates such virtues as consistency and integrity, while the latter carries elements of individuality and intrigue.

When both symmetry and asymmetry are strategically employed, it’s possible for the design to be refined and polished, while at the same time be visually engaging. Like Yin and Yang, these seemingly contradictory forces are interconnected and interdependent; it’s up to the designer to determine precisely how.

What other things do symmetry and asymmetry imply in design? How do you balance the two in your work? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, butterfly image via Alain Picard.

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Is sketching by hand more than a nostalgic activity? How is paper any different from a screen, especially when hardware is becoming more and more sophisticated? Is improving your hand-sketching skills really worthwhile when high-tech software is advancing every day? What difference can a pencil possibly make?

Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about hand-sketching these days. Some absolutely hate the thought of putting their ideas to paper because they can’t draw to save their lives. Others couldn’t imagine their creativity surviving without it. Love it or hate it, there’s much more to a sketchbook than old-school charm.

Here’s the thing. From personal experience, I know that sketching on paper has something powerful about it that takes my designs to the next level. I’ve spent hours in front of both computer screens and sketchpads, and something about the latter always keeps me going longer, thinking more clearly, progressing further and designing better.

To understand why hand-sketching makes such a difference for me and many designers I know, I did some research. Here’s what I found.

External Memory: Take A Load Off Your Mind, Literally

Cognitive psychologists have been studying the impact of sketching on brain functioning for years, and with good reason: Putting ideas to paper is a powerful way to extend one’s memory. Back in 1972, Allen Newell and Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon studied long-term memory, short-term memory and — here’s where it gets interesting — “external” memory. They argued that representations such as diagrams and sketches serve our external memory and reduce the burden that we experience when recalling ideas and problem-solving.

Flexibility: Hand-Sketching Improves Your Ability To Restructure Ideas

Consider your initial idea for a project. At this point, it exists only in your mind. All of a sudden, you start giving it (physical) shape in what Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon call “external representations.” You’re basically pulling the idea from your mind and recording it somehow. As long as the idea is in your mind, the number of changes and improvements you can mentally process is limited. Your idea won’t get anywhere unless you manipulate and enhance it.

External memory aids, such as sketches and diagrams, can help us overcome the limited capacity of our short- and long-term memories.

Here’s where hand-sketching saves the day: It enables us to externalize our mental images and achieve something that Ilse Verstijnen calls “restructuring.” Verstijnen works in the Psychological Laboratory at the University of Utrecht and has coauthored several articles about the relationship between imagery, perception and sketching.

Restructuring transforms one configuration into another, and in scientific studies, advanced hand-sketchers score highest at restructuring when they are allowed to sketch. In an experiment by Verstijnen, sketchers were shown to be better than non-sketchers at modifying their initial ideas and coming up with novel changes.

Because of our brain’s limited processing capacity, externalizing our ideas on paper makes it easier to restructure them, transforming the initial structure into a new one.

Another study by researcher Zafer Bilda and his group at Bilkent University in Turkey compared designers’ cognitive processes when sketching on paper versus using software. The study identifies several significant differences: Designers who used paper changed their goals and intentions more frequently and engaged in a higher number of cognitive actions. Changing goals and intentions while sketching is vital because it enables you to pivot your initial idea and to be versatile in your approach.

Interestingly, these results may have less to do with the way we are wired than with the way we have been educated. Can you remember how you first learned to draw, how all of your design courses required physical sketchbooks? That’s right, most of us learned to sketch on paper — and this might actually have affected the way our brain deals with it.

Here comes another buzzword, from our friends in behavioral psychology: conditioning. If paper was one of the first creative stimuli in your life (to the point that, as soon as you saw a blank sheet, you felt the urge to scribble), then it should come as no surprise that your sketching behavior is different on paper than on screen. Regardless of your philosophy of human behavior, we can all agree on one thing: paper has been around far longer than the digital screen.

Don’t get me wrong: Developers of digital sketching devices out there are definitely raising their game and making the lives of many designers easier in exciting, innovative ways. Manufacturers are making the lighting, size and weight of tablets feel unbelievably similar to paper. They’ve come up with ways to make graphic tablets sensitive to stylus pressure and be capable of digitizing paper sketches instantly. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, we can expect better digital sketching experiences. WACOM, a graphic tablet manufacturer, invites sketchers to tag their creations on Twitter with the #madewithwacom hash tag.

Serendipity: Happy Accidents From Unfinished Strokes

When was the last time you sketched a perfect image? It’s safe to say that most of us do not aim for perfection with a pencil and sketchbook. And that is exactly what makes a pencil stroke different from a vector.

Jonathan Fish and Stephen Scrivener authored “Amplifying the Mind’s Eye: Sketching and Visual Cognition,” in which they introduce the idea that “indeterminacies in Leonardo’s sketches elicit mental imagery because automatic mental recognition mechanisms attempt to complete the missing parts and match precepts to memory images.”

Hand-sketching results in inconclusive strokes that open new doors to creativity.

Consider every time you’ve left unfinished strokes, gray ideas over top solid shapes, quick side queries, blank spaces, wobbly lines and figures. Happens all the time, right? These indeterminacies, or “flaws,” which reflect our indecision, are great pointers to new design directions. We lose these when we opt for pixel perfection.

Group Thinking: Connecting Brains Via Sketches

A group of scientists in the Netherlands, led by Remko van der Lugt, observed four idea-generation meetings in which participants used one technique that involved writing and another one that involved sketching. They concluded that sketching stimulates group creativity by enabling individuals to reinterpret their own ideas further and to facilitate other people’s access to those ideas once they are brought to the table.

Collaborating with others in generating concepts is easier when we share sketches that are flexible, unsettled and, thus, full of possibilities.

Not only does hand-sketching improve the idea-generation process, but it provides an effective, visual language that makes it easier for others to understand, comment on and integrate your ideas. This might be even more important in cross-cultural groups, for whom visual sketches can bridge gaps of understanding.

Effectiveness: Better Design Outcomes

Does sketching like a maniac guarantee a better design? The easy answer is no. The subtler answer is that, in certain circumstances, sketching like a mad person could result in a better design. Yes, you read that right.

A useful design mantra is, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found a thousand sketches that don’t work.”

I ran into this idea while reading one of Maria C. Yang’s studies. She tracked the sketches of a group of engineering students in the idea-generation phase and measured the results according to their final grades and their performance in a contest. She found that the number of concepts that students generated, as evidenced by their sketches, correlated to better design outcomes as long as two things held true: first, the sketches included dimensions and, secondly, the sketches that were significantly tied to the outcome were generated in the first quarter of the cycle (i.e. they were early sketches).

Concentration: Ready, Set, Sketch!

Were you ever in the middle of a major design breakthrough and then were suddenly interrupted? Concentration is key for designers because the creative process is anything but straightforward. The process requires a strong and rare connection between our thoughts, hands and source of inspiration. Its rarity is, indeed, the reason why some of us don’t sleep.

Well, that and deadlines.

There is evidence that sketching aids concentration. Jackie Andrade, of the University of Plymouth’s School of Psychology, tested whether doodling correlated to higher levels of concentration among 40 participants, who tested while taking a telephone call. While we can define doodling as aimlessly sketching patterns and figures unrelated to the primary task, her discovery that it can reduce daydreaming, increase concentration and curb boredom is fascinating.

This helps to explain why some of us find value in carrying our sketchbooks everywhere, pulling them out in the least expected places and in the middle of completely unrelated events.

To recap, sketching stimulates us to a comfortable level — enough to keep us awake, concentrated and engaged. As if this weren’t enough, other studies have found that subjects who consume information on paper were significantly less stressed and tired than those who use screens. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg argued that those who were looking at screens may have been more exhausted because of the “dual-task effect.”

It makes sense. When using a computer, you have to not only complete the task itself, but also figure out your way around the hardware and software. For those of us who learned to sketch on paper, this learning curve feels a lot like stress. For those who are comfortable with graphic tablets and other sophisticated input devices, stress is probably not an issue.

Montessori education encourages children to learn concepts with all five senses.

Some believe that we reach deeper levels of concentration and develop richer concepts when our own hands are the hardware. Regina Rowland, who teaches the “Idea Visualization” course at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has a unique perspective on the matter:

What I noticed when we moved into the digital world was that exercises all started to look the same. All of a sudden, everybody was designing in Photoshop and the quality of the work started changing dramatically. Before, exercises had a character that was unique in each person. I don’t want to ditch digital; there’s stuff in digital that we could never do by hand. But I do think that when you learn how to experience the world in its visual form, you realize that it is important to have a real, multi-sensorial experience and not an abstracted version of the experience.

With digital, you are looking at a screen with 2-D shapes and no interaction. I’ve realized that students who go into a sensorial experience with letters and shapes learn better than those who abstract them.

Now, there are nerves in the tips of your fingers, and I believe that when people draw with their hands it makes a different impression in the brain. There are references to this idea in Montessori education: It is through sensorial experiences that you form structures in your brain, and therefore all their activities and teaching tools are things that children have to do with their fingers.

Talent: Enhancing The Graphic Library In Your Mind

What happens when you continually draw and connect symbols as you sketch? What happens when your brain tries to recall shapes that are appropriate to the idea you are trying to externalize? It isn’t hard to see that the better you become at translating imagery from your mind to paper, the more visual resources you will have to draw on and the easier it will be to retrieve them in the future.

Ian Storer, who lectures in the Department of Design and Technology at Loughborough University, came up with this idea of a “graphical library” that designers can combine and restructure to generate concepts. He states in his paper that “creative sketching and designing requires a body of knowledge to base new ideas upon.”

Would I like to nurture a powerful mind for design? Yes, please.

Hand-sketching forces you to access and cultivate a unique visual library in your mind. As much as I love computers, the Internet and the almighty search engine, would I like to nurture a more powerful mind for design? Yes, please.

Problem-Solving: Unlock Solutions With Visual Synthesis

It is fair to say that most of the problems we face as designers are confounding, fuzzy, indeterminate — the types of problems that common logic stumbles on.

I dare anyone to try to solve these types of problems using only simple paragraphs of text. Writing falls short for most design problems. Jonathan Fish explains this brilliantly in his article “Cognitive Catalysis: Sketches for a Time-Lagged Brain.” He compares our design problems to trees whose trunk and branches are vague or abstract descriptions and whose leaves are images that represent “depictive concrete thought.”

Jonathan Fish explains that our design problems are like trees whose trunk and branches are abstract (usually textual) descriptions and whose leaves are concrete depictions (i.e. images). Most design solutions aim to reconcile these.

He goes on to explain that when you try to solve a design problem that is full of uncertainties, “both description and depiction are interdependent.”

Niall Seery and his colleagues at the University of Limerick propose the best definition of sketching that I’ve ever read:

“Sketching is a sense-making tool which supports the synthesis of visual imagery.”

Ready to improve your flexibility, serendipity, group thinking, effectiveness, concentration, talent and problem-solving? The eight benefits we’ve covered here may be just a few sketches away!

(al ea il)

© Laura Busche for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

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.