DEV Community

Discussion on: What advice would you give a CS student starting their freshman year?

View post
Collapse
 
ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn • • Edited

Other than the somewhat obvious point of making sure to get an internship if at all possible, three things in particular come to mind:

  • Once you've got a basic understanding of something, it's usually worth taking the time to learn why it is the way it is. This will help you long-term to be a better developer (I can't count the number of bugs I've seen because people didn't understand how the underlying system or library they were using worked).
  • Find out if your university offers courses on set theory and graph theory, and make a point to take them if they do but they aren't required for your major. Those are the two most important areas of mathematics after Boolean algebra for understanding a very large number of things in computer science, and they're often only optional courses in CS programs (they're also significantly easier for many people than things like calculus or statistics (though both of those are also really useful courses to have, just less so than set theory and graph theory)).
  • Make a point to get a solid understanding of how version control software works at a high-level before you graduate. Lack of this knowledge is a recurring pain point for many companies when hiring new graduates. Even if you have to study it on your own time, this will make you look much better to prospective employers, because you won't need to go through as much training when you start out. The aforementioned graph theory course will probably help here too (many of the more complex VCS operations are most easily explained in terms of graph theory because they really are operating on a graph structure under the hood).