Career Development

Loyola Services

Career Center

The University’s Career Center, where each student entering the job market should establish a dossier containing letters of recommendation, is located in Sullivan Center, Room 295 (773-508-7716), with a very helpful website: https://www.luc.edu/career/rightcolumn/

Students are encouraged to check our information jobs listings as well at http://jobs.cs.luc.edu. We are routinely contacted by employers who are seeking interns, consultants, and “permanent” employees.

Teaching Opportunities

In addition to occasional teaching assignments for Graduate Assistants (e.g. to help their instructor when he/she needs to be absent), several teaching opportunities are available to experienced graduate students and graduates who have gained experience since leaving our department (with a preference for the latter). The University requires that you have an MS degree; the Department requires that you have taken a wide range of challenging courses, especially in foundational areas such as algorithms, languages, systems, and software engineering with a solid record of achievement in all.

Department Awards

Each year the Department recognizes exceptional graduate students in all of our degree programs. Awards are given for academics and service as described in http://www.luc.edu/cs/academics/awards/.

Academic Publication

Publication

Research-oriented graduate students (especially those pursuing the Thesis Option in MS CS) are encouraged to pursue the publication of one or more journal articles during their graduate career. In the current job market, the publication is an important means of demonstrating to prospective employers a high level of motivation and professional competence. It can also be helpful for your future pursuits as a doctoral student elsewhere.

Ways to prepare for this goal are:

To read journals in your fields of interest regularly to become familiar with both current scholarship and the requirements of scholarly publication,
To approach seminar papers, especially those in your field(s) of interest, as potential publications, possibly even as publications targeted to a particular journal.

In developing a paper for publication, students are of course well advised to work closely with their seminar instructors or faculty mentors.

Conference Presentations and Travel Funding

Presentation of conference papers is an important part of students’ professional development and MS CS students working on a thesis, in particular, should aim to give at least two papers during their graduate careers — preferably including professional and not just graduate-student conferences.

Each semester the Graduate School has funds to support graduate student travel to present papers or chair sessions at conferences. Since funds are limited, students should apply immediately upon acceptance of their papers or sessions. The application is through http://gsps.luc.edu, under internal awards.