John Edstrom's Graduation Weekend at Virginia Tech

Last weekend John graduated from VT.  I posted last Friday what I knew about his achievements (yes, I am a proud father and bragging, but bear with me for this blog post :-)   I also recorded John receiving his degree and is viewable here.

Above is Dr. Barbara Ryder, head of the CS Department for VT, giving John one of his two awards he received at the College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science's Award Ceremony.  John was awarded the CS Service Award and a CS Scholar Award.  John completed his CS degree with minors in mathematics and business.  While at VT, John served as president of ACM; Social Chair of Upsilon Pi Epsilon   -  CS Honor Society; site coordinator, Vice President, and Treasurer of CS-Squared -   was a member of the VT Programming Team and was in VT Honors.  John interned for Microsoft and Optimal Satcom, worked for Sun Microsystems and was web developer for the Collegiate Times.  He also worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the Department of Computer Science. Even with all those extracurriculars, John achieved an overall GPA of 3.96 and in-major of 3.96.  Congratulations to John!

Above is our family at VT's College of Engineering's Computer Science Department's Award Ceremony. From left to right, John's aunt Julie, me, John, my wife Julie, Michael (also at VT), Tim, Ruth Edstrom and John Edstrom (John's grandparents).

 Above is John's VT Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science diploma.

Above is the first award John received.  It is the Department of Computer Science Service Award.

Above is the second award John received.  It is the Department of Computer Science Scholar Award.   John

• graduated #3 from Broad Run High School with a 4.33 GPA.  
• started off VT with 38 college credits because of the number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses he took.   
• is graduating today Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science with minors in math and business.  
• received all A's except for a single A- his entire time at VT.  
• was a Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador - the first one ever at VT.  
• was selected Campus Ambassador of the month for Sun Microsystems.  This was a global selection among over 600 Sun Campus Ambassadors.
• worked on the Collegiate Times his first year.   
• and his room mate, Gabe Martinez, rebuilt the Collegiate Times web site when it went down during the April 16th tragedy.  
• went to Java One 2008 and met James Gosling and John Gage.
• President of VT's Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for two years.
• had his own blog Blogs.Sun.com as a Sun Campus Ambassador that was called The Ponderings of a Hokie
• as President of the ACM, he hosted many industry thought leaders at VT's ACM evening events.
• was asked to interview students and faculty during the April 16th period for the Collegiate Times.
• was recruited and worked for Microsoft in Seattle last summer working on the next version of Windows and specializing in security.  It was a fantastic experience for him.  
• is currently working on his Masters Degree in Computer Security at VT
• VT is a GREAT school that has become even better during some extremely difficult times in the past 3+ years

Needless to say we are very proud of our oldest son.  I am also not shy about blogging how proud we are :-)