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Eradicating computer code constructs

By Gary J. Erwin

No offices. No suits. No cubicles. Just rock t-shirts, peanut-shaped desks, Spongbob Squarepants, the Krusty Krab, Arnold’s Diner and lots of laptops. Can’t forget about the Peach Pit conference room either.

The offices of ePrize are open and inviting, with conference rooms and work spaces titled the Krusty Krab and Arnold’s Diner in honor of well-known animated shows.
A studio for an animated Nickelodeon show? Hardly.

This is ePrize (www.eprize.com), based in Pleasant Ridge of Oakland County, Mich., a Kettering University cooperative education partner that specializes in providing companies interactive promotions to motivate specific consumer behavior to drive immediate, measurable results. With offices in Detroit, London, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, the organization is the country’s leader in tailoring innovative promotion and marketing strategies to help organizations increase customer loyalty.

Some of the professionals ePrize employs are those with Computer Science backgrounds to develop interactive, incentive-based internet promotions. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize that those games they play online through company websites are the kind of things ePrize computer gurus revel in. 

Tim Downs of Albion, Ind., is a Senior III Computer Science (CS) major at Kettering University who also co-ops at e-Prize during his work terms. Downs, who grew up in the country on a horse farm, tinkered with the internet on his own and designed his own websites.

“I didn’t know much about Computer Science or what a CS professional did when I was in high school,” he said, a comment often echoed by many high school students. “I feel that most people in general have a misunderstanding of what Computer Science is. If they looked closer at it, they'd find that the subjects Computer Science students deal with (set theory, regular languages, Turing machines, etc.) are actually really fascinating!” he added.

As a high school student looking at colleges, Downs wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. He toured traditional universities in New York City and Santa Barbara, Calif., but as he put it, “they only spoke of giving me an ‘edge’ against competitors in the work place. Kettering, on the other hand, spoke of how their students were on a different level altogether at graduation. I came here because of the reputation of the school’s co-op program, which puts students on a plane that no other school can offer.”

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