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by Mr_P
2200 days ago
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> Which advice did/would have helped you landing your first job after university? Take a few advanced, specialized CS classes by your 3rd year. These often have large end-of-semester projects that can be fairly open ended. These final projects are a great way differentiate yourself from the thousands of other CS grads looking for jobs. Sure, you could get an 'A' in class by doing the bare minimum for a project. Alternatively, you could go beyond course requirements and have something to show off for potential employers, even if just another resume item to use as a conversation-starter. If you're doing the project anyway, going an extra 10% over the top is relatively easy, especially compared to trying to land a meaningful contribution to an open-source project or building a separate portfolio project from scratch. |
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The bigger firms recruit for raw numbers and then reassign roles. So this might not mean the difference between being hired and not in some of the bigger companies, but on what you're actually pushed towards at the end of the placement cycle.
The technical talent of a new grad is rarely used to explore the deep end of a complicated problem, but instead is full of work that takes time rather than thought. So the last year or so of your course is the last chance for the next 3+ years to work on a complex problem which you are obviously not qualified to work on.
The bare point is that nobody hires you to run a hilly marathon, but will give you tasks that are mile-times instead & expect you to sprint through them. And these are expected even with the best managers, who expect you to grow out of that phase at some point (as frustrating as it is going to be for you).
So the project is going to be the most useful thing for someone to pick you over someone else when dealing with a problem somewhere in the same region of CS.
The thing I did to "get hired" was learn J2EE, but what actually guided the next problem someone threw at me was because I did a bunch of compiler/byte-code junk as an undergrad which ended up being career defining for the next six years.
If I was in a class in today's world, I might do the same with a neural network or some computational genetics.
Not because it is directly tied to getting hired, but very relevant on whether a manager/tech-lead throws a similar problem at you soon. And possibly you'll get to work with the best people who do that for a living.