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

The school year is starting, and freshmen everywhere are taking CS101 (or some equivalent) in their respective universities!

It's an exciting time, but it's also the beginning of a 4-year struggle for some. Like 17 y/o Wellesley freshman me, who dropped out after DS&A, later referred to as a "weed-out" course. :(

What advice would you give to a freshman CS student on their first day of classes?

Comments

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[Saloni Goyal]

Make your resume. A resume is basically a piece of paper where you list out all your achievements, skills and qualifications. A lot of students first build their resume in third or fourth year when they are sitting for internships/jobs.

Create your resume now. It might be an empty piece of paper now. But you can plan your semesters in such a way that you can add a few skills to your resume each semester.

[agentd00nut]

Put every single piece of code you write on git. Every little project, every little investigation into how to do X Y or Z in language A B or C. Make sure that anyone can follow your readme step by step and make it run the exact same way you have it running.
This shows that you know more than a few core languages, this shows that your interested in things that "don't matter" because you like computers and code and not just making $$$. It's good practice learning how to organize your projects to other people can run them, it's good practice in writing documentation, it's good practice in commenting code in places that might be confusing.

Get the proper IDE for the code you're writing.
I write * a lot * of php... I'm not saying phpStorm is the best ide but i'm saying that without something that could auto complete and give argument hints to methods i'd spend a lot more time googling how to pass things in / scrolling through code to find references / where things are declared in my code base.

Sublime text and notepad++ work for quick, dirty, fast, prototypes, after that spend the 30seconds it takes to launch an IDE!

Read.
Other.
People's.
Code.
You will learn so much from other people's code. How NOT to do things, how to do things you didn't know where possible, how NOT to comment, how to comment, how NOT to organize projects, how to organize projects... you get the idea. Most importantly this will both humble you from thinking you are good at anything and shed light on how you are good at some things.

Answer stack overflow questions
Once you have some familiarity with get a stack overflow account and make a bookmark for a feed of the newest questions related to the that you feel familiar enough with and start answering questions.

This is a good reminder that there are smart people struggling with basics.  Or *anyone* struggling with basics. 
More importantly someone will explain why your answer is *WRONG* and may give you some hints as to why.  Some people are assholes and will want to demean you for your answer, ignore that and absorb the knowledge in their chastizing!
This is the easiest way to get people to point you to free advice!

Remember that the internet tends to distill down to showing you the best produced by the best people.
We aren't all "rockstar" programmers, we aren't all 10x programmers, we aren't all redefining what it means to ________. Projects, languages, packages, libraries, programs, repositories, and technologies that make waves that get noticed in "main stream" are the best of the best... the cream of the crop.
don't get discouraged thinking "i'll never write something like that".

It's so easy to get discouraged, ESPECIALLY if you compare yourself to your peers in your class.  If you feel like there are some people in your courses that are finishes assignments as they are being handed out or are openly bragging about how easy something was, *go talk to them*... Don't just hold a grudge or develop feelings of inadequacy.

Obviously someone might just be on a power trip and not be recpetive to someone admitting that they are struggling but i bet you'd be surprised how many people would be willing to show off their work or could explain a topic in a way that makes it *far* more understandable than a book or lecture ever could.

This applies even online!  Reach out through a private channel to someone and ask poignant questions about something that you can't understand and i'm more times than not you'll receive a comprehensive answer.  People like to help and share knowledge!!

Contribute to projects, look up how others have contributed to projects as well!

This is basically the same as advice as answering stack overflow questions.

Go on git, find a project you have *some* experience in the language being used, find a low hanging fruit, read the proper protocol for making a pull request, fork, make the changes, make the pull request.

Either someone will explain why you're request isn't proper and you learn.
Or someone suggests some modifications before you can pull and you learn.
Or you make a solid contribution to a project that is project!

You can't lose!

Most importantly don't lose sight of why you got into comp sci. If you're here just for money then you might be in for a bad time down the road.
Don't forget that everyone struggles, everyone. There are days where i envy anyone who gets to be outside during their work day. There are days when looking at a monitor or touching my keyboard make me phsyically ill.
But by keeping side projects that you enjoy really true love to work on, you'll keep the spark of imagination and creativity alive in your work and that will encourage you to trudge through the 19th assignment of the semester!!!

On the opposite side of the token it's OKAY to have other hobbies and desires outside of the computer world and will make you a more rounded person for that! Definitely learn to unplug completely and just go do ANYTHING that doesn't involve a screen. literally anything that isn't infront of a screen that you do regularly will make sure you don't get burnt out!

[Sean Carlisle]

Have a git. Play with different stuff. Extracurriculars robotics or other groups. Ta's research ask get involved.use university resources to the max.

[Dante White]

******* extremely useful information ******
Book reading list

1. Code - this book is your foundation
2. Deepwork - this book will teach you how to block out distractions
3. Head first C
4. Head first java
5. Data structures and algorithms by wiely
6. The Algorithm Design Manuel
7. Design Patterns by
8. Headfirst design patterns (best book)

Practice your craft.

1. codingbats.com
2. HackerRanker
3. Leetcode

[Dublin Anondson]

I just got done reading Deep Work recently, fantastic book!

[Zach Frazier]

You get as much out of the CS classes as you put in. If you do the bare minimum, you won't learn nearly as much. Learn to love documentation. It is intimidating to read at first but it is an invaluable resource. It also helps you write better documentation in the future.

[Keith Gomoll]

Starting out is great! But i would ask you to spend a little time on the ending, I have yet to find a retired coder. Being in CS means always learning always expanding. Take some time and look at the long game, i know many older web devs who couldn't adapt and left the industry while others adapted to other careers. The end game must be considered if you want to eat.

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

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).

[undermark5]

My advice applies to way more than just CS, but participate in class. I didn't start doing this until part way through my second year and it made a huge difference. I was able to get on campus jobs as a TA for the courses that I took because of it. One professor wrote essentially a letter of recommendation to the professor in charge and an another professor essentially just straight up offered me the position because I participated in the class that I was taking from him (I was taking the course he needed TAs for as well and he had substitutes for it on occasion so he also knew I was in it), then when I was looking for full time positions my senior year, I was also able to ask my professors for letters of recommendation and just overall had really good relationships with them. (One of them even used the title Dr. with me because of how much he respected me)

Another thing is teach others the concepts that you are learning. My job as a TA really helped me with that, but also I was able to do it working together with my friends. You understand things so much more fully when you are able to teach them.

Last piece of advice is make friends in your classes. You might not see them again after you graduate, but I made good buddies with some people and we would do group projects together or ask each other about classes they've already taken or things like that.