ABOUT ME

My name is Steven Cohen and I am 27 years old. I was born in Portland, Oregon in 1981.

Although I wouldn't consider my family one that moved a lot, we have lived all across the USA. When I was 4 years old, my family moved from Portland, Oregon to West Palm Beach, Florida (due to my father's work). We lived in Florida for 2 years, and then moved to Williamson, New York; to be near my grandparents. After living in my grandparents' house for a year, we moved to a duplex in Fairport, New York (a suberb of Rochester). After 2 years of staying in the duplex, we bought a house in a nearby neighborhood, where my parents still live.

I lived in my parents' house until I left for my university, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). During my first year at RIT, I stayed in the RIT Inn and Conference Center. This was because they didn't have a room for me on campus. For my final year, I rented a room in a house in Rochester from a friend of a friend.

During highschool I attended a class at BOCES, which taught about computer hardware and cabling. Up until that point, I had been very good with the software aspect of computing (usage and repair), but had known nothing about hardware. While still in the class, I received my A+ certification and my C-Tech Copper Cabling certification.

After graduating Fairport Highschool in 2001, I decided to go to Monroe Community College (MCC) with the intention of continuing after graduation at an university (namely Rochester Institute of Tehcnology (RIT)). MCC is a community college that has a good reputation for computer related majors. My goal was to major in Information Technology at RIT, so I decided to major in the closest match I could find at MCC, Computer Systems Technology, A.A.S (they now actually have an IT degree).

Unfortunately, although my MCC major was closer then other degrees to IT, it wasn't a perfect match. Because of this disparity, MCC did not have a 2+2 program to require the preliminary courses I needed for IT at RIT. So I decided to stay an extra year at MCC and take the courses that I needed in order to transfer into RIT as a 3rd year IT student.

I graduated with distinction from MCC in 2004 and transferred to RIT as a third year IT student. As an IT student, I was required to have two IT concentrations and one liberal arts concentration (or minor). For my two IT concentrations, I chose Web Site Development and Interactive Multimedia Development. And for my LA concentration, I chose Japanese (I would have minorred in it if I had had more time).

Part of the curriculum in IT is a required three semesters on co-op. Co-op is on-the-job training and while being trained, you get paid as an employee (although usually for less money then a full-time employee would make).

• 1st co-op: I designed and maintained a website for a small automotive repair shop.
• 2nd co-op: I attended 13 weeks of training as a C# developer at a company in New Jersey, called SetFocus. This training consisted of intensive lecture weeks followed by a week-long project. The projects we worked on were:
  1. The .NET framework (this was a console application)
  2. A Windows forms project to manage a library (Member management and inventory management).
  3. Making the library project into an N-tiered application with a Business Tier, ADO, and connecting to (and developing Stored Procedures for) Sql Server 2005.
  4. Transforming the library project into a Web-based application.
  5. Changing the way the application connected to the database from a direct ADO methodology into a web-service based one.
• 3rd co-op: Staying at SetFocus, I worked as a junior level programmer and an assistant System/Network Administrator.