Employers today are looking for more than a degree; they’re seeking rounded recruits who are ready to work. That’s why NC State gives students every opportunity to succeed, from undergraduate research and industry internships to service learning and ongoing career development.
NC State offers outstanding experiential education across all its colleges, from the humanities and social sciences to design, education, textiles and veterinary medicine. And we’re a leader in every field that tops USA Today‘s list of the highest-paying degrees of 2015: engineering, computer science, math and sciences, business, and agriculture and natural resources.
Roshane Williams was the first in his family to head to college straight out of high school. Now he’s taking his electrical engineering degree from NC State to Research Triangle Park and IBM. There, he’ll work on the company’s Watson project – the computer system that famously won Jeopardy!
Williams’ family is from Jamaica, but he grew up in New York, first in the city and later upstate. One of six children, he has been inspired in part by the example of his older sister, Samantha, who went back to college to pursue a degree in English and is now working on her master’s.
Roshane Williams
Although Williams majored in electrical engineering, his extensive internship experience – including three terms at Blackberry and another at Siemens – have steered him more toward the software side.In preparation for his full-time job at IBM, he’s now learning Java and other programming languages, a strong example of the self-directed learning NC State instills.
“Employers know the challenges we go through,” Williams noted. “They know that we can learn what we need to learn to get the job done.”
In the longer term, he has ambitions to earn his Master of Business Administration and maybe even start his own company. Wherever he goes next, he knows he can rely on the skills and focus his time at NC State has taught him.
“Just to get through this program, you have to take yourself away from everything else and say, ‘okay, this is what I want to do, and this is what I want to accomplish,’” said Williams. “We actually had to learn how to solve problems. NC State gave me a mindset of how to solve problems.”
\Source: Adapted from NC State article “Think and Do”