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Pogba
Student
New York, New York
5
Questions
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What exactly is the process after college from graduating as a computer science graduate with a bachelor's
#JULY20 #tech#cs
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2 answers
Eric Baker
Computer Engineering Intern
1
Answer
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Updated
Eric’s Answer
As someone going into their last semester of college, I hope I can give you some information about this that will be helpful. To give you a bit of a background about me - I am doing computer engineering but have had most of my classes/internships revolve around the software side of things. That means I will likely be applying for the same types of jobs as students who graduate with a computer science degree.
There is no one-size-fits-all path that you need to take. With that being said, most students will look for full-time positions with a company that they have already interned for. Otherwise, they will may begin sending out applications around the start of their senior year or possibly earlier.
If you haven't graduated yet and don't have much work experience, then I would recommend working on a personal project that you can showcase to employers. Also, using sites like LeetCode.com and Hackerrank.com are good ways to prepare for a technical interview. However, it is important to know that companies do not always directly test your technical ability during an interview. That means that it is just as important to focus on your responses to common 'social interview' questions. These are things like "Tell me about yourself", or "Tell me about the most impactful project you worked on and why it meant so much to you". While they are intentionally generic or sound open-ended, it is for that reason that employers use it as a chance to see how prepared the applicant is.
Even if you have already graduated, I would still recommend looking into the action-items mentioned in the last paragraph, as they are extremely common in the process of getting a full-time job straight out of college.
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<Comment>
I completely understand what you mean - I think that most of my real hands-on learning was actually from my internships. I have taken many courses that, like you said, only give the "background" or theory. You should take whatever programming language(s) you are most comfortable with right now and try to build something like a desktop app, a website, or even general script (like in Python) to perform a task on your computer.
YouTube is probably my favorite resource for learning and trying new projects. You can learn anything you would ever need to know about programming for free online. Whether it's YouTube, a coding blog, or some other website.
Some more specific examples from my own experience are:
1) Building my own website for free with GitHub - I have used it as a working example to test out website designs and other features that can be created in JavaScript and HTML/CSS. They have a tutorial on how to get started here https://pages.github.com/. If you don't have an idea what you want your website to look like or be about, then start with a portfolio about yourself or a hobby and try to model the design after other websites you think have a nice design. If you have never tried to build a website before, then you will learn a lot in the process of trying to recreate another website's design (I want to be clear though that I am not condoning plagiarism - I just think that for educational purposes, if you were to do this, then you would learn a lot).
2) Some channels like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imN-vhi5ZWQ) contain a lot of interesting projects that you could build off of and make your own, which you could then showcase on your website.
3) Again, I am not sure if you are in college still, but the best thing I have found to learn and try new projects is to look at your school's list of professors and see if they have any postings for software-related projects. Or just look for any professors in your relevant major, as well as any you may have previously taken a class with.
My very first project outside of school work was when I reached out to a random professor at my school via email and told her I was interested in her research and that I would like to work for her for free if she needed any software related work done. She agreed to meet and after we spoke she told me that she would get me paid by the University anyway. I then went on to build for her a fairly simple Python script that would read all the text files she wanted and parse them to give them a score based on criteria she gave me. At this time I had hardly any idea what I was doing, but I stuck with it and continued to google things step-by-step until I got it to work. I had continued to work for her on various projects over the following 2 years or so and it gave me a lot of good experience.
Hopefully you find some of this helpful - feel free to let me know if you have more questions!
There is no one-size-fits-all path that you need to take. With that being said, most students will look for full-time positions with a company that they have already interned for. Otherwise, they will may begin sending out applications around the start of their senior year or possibly earlier.
If you haven't graduated yet and don't have much work experience, then I would recommend working on a personal project that you can showcase to employers. Also, using sites like LeetCode.com and Hackerrank.com are good ways to prepare for a technical interview. However, it is important to know that companies do not always directly test your technical ability during an interview. That means that it is just as important to focus on your responses to common 'social interview' questions. These are things like "Tell me about yourself", or "Tell me about the most impactful project you worked on and why it meant so much to you". While they are intentionally generic or sound open-ended, it is for that reason that employers use it as a chance to see how prepared the applicant is.
Even if you have already graduated, I would still recommend looking into the action-items mentioned in the last paragraph, as they are extremely common in the process of getting a full-time job straight out of college.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<Comment>
I completely understand what you mean - I think that most of my real hands-on learning was actually from my internships. I have taken many courses that, like you said, only give the "background" or theory. You should take whatever programming language(s) you are most comfortable with right now and try to build something like a desktop app, a website, or even general script (like in Python) to perform a task on your computer.
YouTube is probably my favorite resource for learning and trying new projects. You can learn anything you would ever need to know about programming for free online. Whether it's YouTube, a coding blog, or some other website.
Some more specific examples from my own experience are:
1) Building my own website for free with GitHub - I have used it as a working example to test out website designs and other features that can be created in JavaScript and HTML/CSS. They have a tutorial on how to get started here https://pages.github.com/. If you don't have an idea what you want your website to look like or be about, then start with a portfolio about yourself or a hobby and try to model the design after other websites you think have a nice design. If you have never tried to build a website before, then you will learn a lot in the process of trying to recreate another website's design (I want to be clear though that I am not condoning plagiarism - I just think that for educational purposes, if you were to do this, then you would learn a lot).
2) Some channels like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imN-vhi5ZWQ) contain a lot of interesting projects that you could build off of and make your own, which you could then showcase on your website.
3) Again, I am not sure if you are in college still, but the best thing I have found to learn and try new projects is to look at your school's list of professors and see if they have any postings for software-related projects. Or just look for any professors in your relevant major, as well as any you may have previously taken a class with.
My very first project outside of school work was when I reached out to a random professor at my school via email and told her I was interested in her research and that I would like to work for her for free if she needed any software related work done. She agreed to meet and after we spoke she told me that she would get me paid by the University anyway. I then went on to build for her a fairly simple Python script that would read all the text files she wanted and parse them to give them a score based on criteria she gave me. At this time I had hardly any idea what I was doing, but I stuck with it and continued to google things step-by-step until I got it to work. I had continued to work for her on various projects over the following 2 years or so and it gave me a lot of good experience.
Hopefully you find some of this helpful - feel free to let me know if you have more questions!
Thank You Eric, I feel like Coding isn't really taught in college but like the background behind which makes it kind of hard to showcase projects and what kind of projects are you talking about.
Pogba
Hi Pogba, I added my response to this comment to my original answer, under the dashed lines and the "<Comment>", since the comment-length here was restricting me from posting.
Eric Baker
Sarah Hanson
6
Answers
Updated
Sarah’s Answer
As a student, the best thing you can do is set yourself up to have a job lined up by graduation through internships, projects and networking. If you've already graduated with no prospects in sight, many companies have new-graduate rotational programs where you work on a few different teams until you find the right fit for you. During your senior year or after graduation, you can apply for these positions. Also try reaching out to your school's career center or CS department. Most CS departments get many emails from local employers about opportunities they have available for graduates of the program. They might be able to point you in the right direction.
Thankyou, that makes sense, I just feel like being in college, you're so busy that you don't even have time to learn the different coding languages that will be used in software companies and are instead learning the basic skills behind coding in college.
Pogba