My Draft For Approaching An Organization

This blog will be a draft of the conversation I had with the start-up organization, Mu Beta Solutions. Earlier I went ahead and contacted the co-owner, Chris Makoto, and was invited to join him on one of his personal projects. As of right now, any project work involving Mu Beta Solutions is still pending as they're hard pressed to meet deadlines - as is the nature of start-up businesses. For more information about the personal project, skip below the draft.


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1. Introduce myself as a HPU student and succinctly say that I would like to assist their organization as part of a couple class projects (I have to do a similar project with another class so I was hoping to hit two birds with one stone by having both classes focus on the same project).


2. Briefly highlight the objectives of my two projects Our class, software engineering will mainly focus around creating functioning software that will be beneficial to the organization. Since the company focuses around creating software for other organizations, participating in some of their projects will help me understand the thought-process that goes into software development. My second project focuses around the 'sustainability' of the organization. Being a start-up business, I believe that investing in students, such as myself and others in the class, will help the company stay afloat in the long run.


3. Say that you understand that their company is still new and they may neither have the time nor the resources to accommodate me or my fellow students. Also say that while I'm not looking for pay, I am looking for on-hand experience to essentially learn-the-ropes of being a professional programmer.


4. Mention my [meager] skill set and interests. My most best programming languages are Java and C++ and I am quite familiar with Python, Ruby, and Basic. My interests include networking and security.

5. Thank the person (Chris) for their time and include my contact information

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Needless to say, I was told that I can help Chris with one his personal projects. The project has no affiliation with Mu Beta Solutions (as of right now anyways). From Chris himself, this is currently what the current project entails:

"I would like you to help me with integrating social media into my project, and we can see if we can get something to where we can observe user behavior and use graph theory analysis to see if we can see any trends. Trends such as little communities, see if one users actions resonates towards other users. And use this information to help further build the social media within the system itself."

Basically what he plans to have me do is help him gather data from various social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter to create a website in which users index their content to receive help from other users. He described it as something akin to craigslist.


As mentioned before, an official position in Mu Beta will still be question until their schedule becomes less volatile. I am told that I would know more about their situation in a week from now.