What advice would you give to university (college) students?

Comments

[Bence Szabo]

Listen to podcasts in the domain you are interested in. They keep you up to date on what's going on in the real world and it won't be a shock later.

[Jason Huebel]

That's great advice. University doesn't prepare you for the real world. It's concepts and theory. That's not a bad thing, mind you. But it's less practical than, say, a vocational school or other targeted training that's focused on job skills.

Personally, I feel like the value of university for your average developer is low. You end up with tens of thousands of dollars in debt for skills that you could have easily learned on your own. I will qualify that by saying that the data sciences are different. I see the value of university there. But then again, people who focus on data sciences often end up in academia. So they won't be exposed to the real world anyway.

That said, I still feel like most developers aren't doing themselves any favors by drowning themselves in school debt early in life for skills that they could learn elsewhere.

(EDIT: "real world" meaning the normal for-profit job market. That's not meant to be disparaging.)

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

I think the value really depends on what you're doing. Depending on what math courses you take, a university setting can be extremely helpful for learning them (graph theory and set theory come to mind, both are remarkably useful knowledge for software development in general, but many people have trouble learning either without the guided setting of an actual university course).

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

Look at what concepts your intended industry cares about that are not regularly covered by typical degree programs in your field, and do what you can to learn those well. A particularly good example of this in the field of programming is version control. Most college courses don't cover it very well, if at all, and having at least the basics is critical for starting out smoothly in a new job as a programmer (at least, it is at any place that's actually good to work at as a programmer).

Beyond that though, look to diversify your skills as much as possible. Learning a foreign language is a great option for this because it's something you can put on a resumé that actually has practical applications even if the job doesn't require it. The same goes for basic coding skills (real coding, not VBA macros in Excel) if you're in a degree field other than CS, CEG, or EE, or extra programming languages that aren't normally taught in most universities' computer science programs (Rust, Go, and Python are probably the three most generically useful right now).