Oh yes, it's true: U-Dub does put the "dub" in "www". The AeA, the American Electronics Association, has given Seattle a gold star for its tech-nastiness. The city led the nation in net new tech jobs in 2006, and these jobs make it that much better for University of Washington grads, who have access to the Washington offices of Microsoft, Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, Intel, and Google. Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor believes that access to internships and collaborative research programs at such companies it vital to the success of University of Washington students.

One University of Washington grad reaping the benefits of Seattle is Jeff Dean, an employee of Google, the company chosen as Fortune’s number one place to work in the country in 2007. Dean told Computer World, which named U-Dub the “IT School to Watch”:

“Although I was focusing on compilers and programming languages for my Ph.D. research, I took classes and attended seminars in a bunch of other areas, including computer architecture, operating system design, distributed systems, algorithms and complexity theory, computer graphics and software engineering. The breadth is incredibly valuable at a company like Google, where many projects involve working across many disciplines.”

I hardly know what those classes and seminars involve, but I’ll just leave it to the University of Washington Google types. Oh University of Washington, how you rock my little techie socks off! Or should I say, “OUW, HYRMLTSO!”