Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?

I ended up teaching myself programming (and electronics) while doing a double major in math and physics, which led me to develop enough of an interest that I continued in physics through grad school.

I had a summer internship at a computing facility, which led me to think that a pure programming job would actually be kind of boring. Again, this was long ago, and is related to my interests and not yours.

Today, I program. A lot. In fact, if you walk past my office (my basement right now), you've got a 50% or better chance of seeing a code editor up on my screen. But I use programming as a problem solving tool, and am not employed as a programmer. Good programming skill is a "force multiplier" for virtually any occupation.

One thing about college is that many students change their majors. College is a place where you can be exposed to a whole variety of fields, and where you can soak up the vibe of a field and get excited about it. I don't know where I'd have found my love of physics at a coding boot camp.

CS attracts a lot of students who are interested in computers, or who hear that it's lucrative, but are not necessarily interested in computer science as an end unto itself. But, figuring this out is part of the college experience!

One thing you should absolutely put on your radar: are you at all interested in grad school?

You have plenty of time to actually make the decision to go to grad school (plenty of people don't decide until years after graduating), but if you think it might even be a remote possibility, there are two things you absolutely need to do:

(1) Get STELLAR letters of recommendation. This is the most important thing to know, and you should consider that you'll need between 3 and 6 depending on your program.

(2) Keep your GPA above ~3.5 (landing something lower won't break your application, but it will make your life harder).

Lots of the career advice I've seen maps to getting SWE jobs in industry, where things like your undergrad GPA, research experience, and letters of recommendation don't matter as much. You can be a phenomenal engineer at a "prestigious" company (whatever that means to you) with a huge variety of undergrad track records (including not even going to college!). But just like getting a referral from someone who works at a certain company is a higher-signal (and easier) way to select an applicant to interview than trying to sort through a stack of resumes, getting a "referral" from a professor in the form of a letter of recommendation is a higher-signal way to filter applications than basically anything else. For research, grad school admissions committees tend to not care too much about internships / work experience, unless they're tied to research in some way. If you're interested in this, read the link at the end of this post [0].

Also, considering COVID-19's impact on engineering hiring right now, if you're having trouble finding an internship, doing a summer of undergraduate research can be a great backdoor to getting some hands-on experience, work with a professor, and

Generally, on the career side of things, I'd say spend a good chunk of time exploring what types of work you enjoy and find engaging. It's hard to predict what this will be when you're coming in, so do lots of small experiments to try to figure this out. Build small projects, reach out to professors and try your hand at research, join clubs and find other students who share your interests.

The last thing I'll say here is realize that there might be a whole set of career options you didn't even know existed coming in. Amongst my friends, the most common "discovered" post-graduate plan was (management) consulting, which virtually none of my friends knew existed coming into college, and many ended up getting excited about while there.

Overall, you'll be hard-pressed to find another space where you're surrounded by thousands of other people your age who are excited about learning, meeting each other, and working on ambitious stuff. There's way more to do and discover than there was in high school, but you'll also have to be much more active in finding and leveraging opportunities instead of waiting things to come to you. Work hard and explore, but also remember to make friends, let loose, find some parties, go on dates, stay healthy, and keep an open mind throughout. It's a wild ride, and it can be an incredibly rewarding handful of years. Good luck!

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf

Especially when the resume next to yours is someone from a top-20 CS program who's been at AirbnUberLyft for 4 years.

Those same friends will be the start of your professional network. The more contacts you have the better for you career.

Finally try to intern during your holidays. Work experience will help you land a job.