Professional Development Seminar: Negotiating Your Offer

So now you've got an offer from someplace you'd like to work. But you're not sure how to evaluate the offer.... Can, or even should, you ask for more?  What is and what isn't negotiable? What should you be asking about that you aren't?  Are there any resources to help you determine if the offer is competitive?  This session will feature panelists who can share their perspectives as alums, recruiters, and career services advisors and provide insight and advice on what you can expect, how you can prepare, and do's and don'ts of negotiating.

I graduated from Illinois back in 2018 with my bachelors + masters in CS. While there, I ran HackIllinois and OTCR Consulting and was also involved with Contrary Capital, ACM, and WCS. On campus, you could usually find me splitting between hanging out at Firehaus (a now closed bar that had karaoke), grabbing a burger at Joes, or furiously working in a Siebel conference room. I grew up in the Bay Area, and after graduation returned here to join Rubrik, an enterprise data management startup. Then, this past April, I joined Siteline, a construction-tech startup, as a SWE and the 5th employee - Joel Poloney, another alumni, is actually one of the founders of the company. Previously, I interned at Uber and VMWare. While I am currently a SWE, I've heavily considered consulting, product management, and VC roles so I'm happy to talk about any of those. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, sports of all kinds (both playing and watching), and reading fantasy/sci fi books. 

Nathan Handler graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015 with his Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. He has been involved with the open source community for over a decade, primarily through his roles as an Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer and a member of the freenode IRC staff. During the day, he works at Reddit as a Site Reliability Engineer on the Video team based out of San Francisco. Previously, he has worked at Orchid Labs to help build the crypto powered VPN and as a Site Reliability Engineer on Yelp's Operations team. As a student, he co-directed HackIllinois 2015 and helped found Sail. He served as ACM Treasurer in 2012 and was a sysadmin and member of the Reflections | Projections staff.

Lauren Stites, Associate Director with Engineering Career Services at Illinois.  An energetic communicator with a passion and proven ability to motivate and empower others to take action towards their career goals while providing resources to encourage informed decision-making. She brings over a decade of experience with personal branding, career coaching and preparation of early-career talent for the job market.