In my experience, the most important parts of the guide all relate to preparedness. It is absolutely essential that you practice interview questions before hand. When I say practice, I don’t mean simply read the books, but actually do mock interviews on a white board. Learn to talk out loud, and work with your peers to get real experience. This will not only make you more comfortable with the questions that will be asked, but also generally better at communicating your responses and working together with the interviewer. As we tried to make clear in the podcast, an interview is a two-way conversation, it is not simply the interviewer sitting in silence while you write mystic code on a whiteboard.
The second piece of the guide that I want to emphasize is the side projects. The kind of work that engineers do in industry is remarkably different from the pure, somewhat sterile problems that are often addressed in academic classes. Having experience working on your own projects will help prepare you for what industry coding will be like, although probably with less structure. Secondly, it gives you great talking points in interviews. Interviewers love to see passion and interest, and having a side project that you are excited to talk about is a great way to cover both of those bases. I feel that it is a lot easier to talk about personal projects than school projects, which usually have a pre-defined goal and requirements. With a side project, you can choose the area that you are interested in working in, and all of the goals of the project, yourself.
This leads into the topic of school goals and curriculum fairly well. I appreciate that the goal of a university is not necessarily to help you find a good job, but rather to educate the students as best they can, and to really stretch minds. I don’t think this should change, the benefits of a broad education are well described. However, the teachings and curriculum should at least keep in mind that most of the students will be heading into the industry once their studies are completed. Therefore, while it shouldn’t be the key of the classes, they should keep pace with the expectations that industry has of students. Unfortunately, I do not think the Notre Dame CSE curriculum does this. They way it is currently laid out, students often do not learn the skills they are expected to know for internships and interviews until after the time has passed. I know that I personally have had to teach myself most of data structures and algorithms so that I would be prepared for interviews at major tech companies and be competitive with applicants from other universities.
I know that the curriculum is improving, and I am very excited for this. The combination of Fund Comp II and data structures into one class seems to me both logical and easy, and is something I have been pushing for since I took those classes. This will make students much more competitive when applying for internships during the first semester of their junior year, as many technical interviews center on data structures such as binary trees and hash maps. I still think the curriculum could be improved more however. I would like to see the opportunit for students to begin taking coding classes, such as the Script Based Programming class offered to non-CS majors, during their freshman year. This both allows students more of a chance to get a feel for computer science, and allows those who already know they want to major in it to build their skills as early as possible. Overall however, I am very happy with the changes that are beginning to take shape.
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