“School’s Out Forever . . .

”- Alice Cooper

Brent Bonnin begins his senior year of college filled with excitement and a twinge of fear. The
excitement stems from his anticipation of being done with it all—professors, exams, problem
sets, grades, group meetings, all-nighters . . . The list could go on and on. The fear stems from the
fact that he is graduating in December and has only four months to find a job.

Brent is a little unsure about how he should approach the job search. During his
sophomore and junior years, he had certainly heard seniors talking about their strategies for
finding the perfect job, and he knows that he should first visit the Campus Career Planning Center
to devise a search plan.

On September 1, the first day of school, he walks through the doors of the Campus
Career Planning Center and meets Elizabeth Merryweather, a recent graduate overflowing with
energy and comforting smiles. Brent explains to Elizabeth that since he is graduating in
December and plans to begin work in January, he wants to leave all of November and December
open for interviews. Such a plan means that by October 31 he has to have all his preliminary
materials, such as cover letters and résumés, submitted to the companies where he wants to work.

Elizabeth recognizes that Brent has to follow a very tight schedule, if he wants to meet
his goal within the next 60 days. She suggests that the two of them sit down together and decide
the major milestones that need to be completed in the job search process. Elizabeth and Brent list
the 19 major milestones. For each of the 19 milestones, they identify the other milestones that
must be accomplished directly before Brent can begin this next milestone. They also estimate the
time needed to complete each milestone. The list is shown below.
In the evening after his meeting with Elizabeth, Brent meets with his buddies at the college coffee
house to chat about their summer endeavors. Brent also tells his friends about the meeting he had
earlier with Elizabeth. He describes the long to-do list he and Elizabeth developed and says that he is
really worried about keeping track of all the major milestones and getting his job search organized.
One of his friends reminds him of the cool management science class they all took together in the
first semester of Brent’s junior year and how they had learned about some techniques to organize
large projects. Brent remembers this class fondly since he was able to use a number of the methods
he studied in that class in his last summer job.

a. Draw the project network for completing all milestones before the interview process. If
everything stays on schedule, how long will it take Brent until he can start with the interviews?
What are the critical steps in the process?

b. Brent realizes that there is a lot of uncertainty in the times it will take him to complete some of
the milestones. He expects to get really busy during his senior year, in particular since he is
taking a demanding course load. Also, students sometimes have to wait quite a while before
they get appointments with the counselors at the career center. In addition to the list estimating
the most likely times that he and Elizabeth wrote down, he makes a list of optimistic and
pessimistic estimates of how long the various milestones might take.

How long will it take Brent to get everything done under the worst-case scenario? How long will it
take if all his optimistic estimates are correct?
c. Determine the mean critical path for Brent’s job search process. What is the variance of the
project duration?

d. Give a rough estimate of the probability that Brent will be done within 60 days.

Source: Introduction to Operations Research by Hillier and Lieberman