Epic Systems

Madison is a great city, full of young people with plenty to do on the weekends in the area. The company is very friendly and welcoming to young people, and is expanding very rapidly. The campus is beautiful, and fellow employees were helpful and encouraging.

I worked in the office on a team of people with many different backgrounds. You could easily pop in and ask the Graphic Designer, QA'er, or a more experienced developer any question you had, and they were happy to dedicate time to help.

Also note that your primary development audience are doctors and physicians (aka older people), which changes design and implementation approaches a little bit. The company spends a lot of time training their customers to try and get them familiar with their eclectic array of applications.

The food is great and very inexpensive (<$5 for a real steak and potatoes), and they're adding on more and more to the campus every year. Tunnels and walkways allow you to stay indoors no matter where you're going to avoid the snow. Bridges and fun themes keep things exciting and interesting (also the treehouse).

I loved my summer here and will likely be back after I graduate in the spring.

Also one of the best salaries offered out of school for a developer (considering cost of living is so low in Madison), which certainly helps.

Cold, not really a place to work for more than 5-10 years. Good to wet your professional whistle and make some good money in a great city, but my true love is learning new tech and advancing my personal skills.

You won't see Epic delving into AngularJS or NodeJS or Python/PHP dev with complex web app front ends anytime soon. Also, not allowed to use open source libraries in your work without specific legal approval, like JQuery.

You'll likely be programming in C++ or VB with HTML/CSS, with a chance of Objective-C or Java if doing mobile. Not quite the same as the other large tech companies or startup scene.

Be open to using new technologies, and focus way more time on updating the design of your apps. Please redesign Hyperspace. Most of the apps feel like they're still stuck in the 90s.