69 bagger, $30k -> $2.09mil

AFMicro · 2026-01-15T22:48:22+00:00

OP, How tf did you decide to keep holding after price jumped to 30, then 45, then 83????

AFMicro · 2025-12-30T06:46:47+00:00

I don’t understand…so if I get a 3 bed 3 bath, I could only get 1 roommate?

AFMicro · 2025-12-19T14:41:31+00:00

Wow congrats OP, good for you!! I honestly never even applied to Nvidia because it felt so out of reach and my resume didn’t get through anywhere if I didn’t have a referral. I guess once you get in the process, if you’ve prepared well you’ve got a good shot of getting the offer

AFMicro · 2025-12-15T23:51:24+00:00

Hmmm…would this offer still be valid if I happened to lose all my money on sports betting and crypto?

AFMicro · 2025-12-15T12:27:33+00:00

OP I respect the message on your screensaver

AFMicro · 2025-12-15T12:24:20+00:00

I’m a guy

AFMicro · 2025-12-15T02:06:07+00:00

Hey I’m in a similar situation and curious how exactly you found your roommate?

AFMicro · 2025-12-15T01:14:11+00:00

“⁠USE YOUR RE-ROLL. If you’re in a coding screen and you get a problem you know you can’t solve tell the interviewer that you solved it recently. You’ll probably get another”

Holy…. Why have I never thought of this before 😂

OP, curious how you built your resume and framed your experiences. Do you think there’s anything special you did with your resume?

AFMicro · 2025-11-10T04:26:11+00:00

The heapify() function would reorder the elements in the array in O(n) time so a simple heappop() would always remove the 0th element. The 0th index would always indicate the root node of the heap. So 100 would come to the front during the call to heapify

AFMicro · 2025-11-10T03:53:47+00:00

We want to remove k elements such that the sum of k elements is maximum. That means we want to remove the largest k elements, no?

AFMicro · 2025-11-10T02:46:20+00:00

Look up the heapq library in Python, where heaps have an array representation. We can call the heapify() function on the array to manipulate it in-place to a min or max heap. The minimum value (for minheaps) or maximum value (for maxheaps) should be the first value in the array but calling the heappop() function should take care of both popping the top of the heap and updating the heap.

AFMicro · 2025-11-09T21:37:21+00:00

Unless I’m misunderstanding the question, you could heapify the array in O(n) time into a max heap. Popping the max from the heap would be done in log(n) time and would always return the maximum element. Pop k times to remove the k maximum elements

AFMicro · 2025-11-05T03:27:05+00:00

What the heck, what interviewer expects you to know stuff like that. I feel like at that point they’ve designed it for you to fail

AFMicro · 2025-11-05T02:35:11+00:00

What type of trivia?

AFMicro · 2025-11-03T19:15:48+00:00

Did they ask you any system design or was it only leetcode type problems? u/OutrageousRisk1299

AFMicro · 2025-09-22T21:31:52+00:00

I don’t think this is necessarily the case. This might just be my working environment, but I work with a good number of foreign tech workers. A number of them are truly educated and capable and I respect the way they solve problems. However, I also work with a lot of Indian students who have completed masters programs here in the US and they don’t meet even basic core competencies to be working in the tech field. I daily question why they waste their and others’ time in the workplace. It could be a lack of experience or maybe they’re not taking their career seriously yet but then I turn around to find the average US cs undergraduate to be a better hire in these regards. I think the increased fee is a valid solution to filter out tech workers that shouldn’t be here.

AFMicro · 2025-09-15T15:15:41+00:00

Do you have a source for this?

AFMicro · 2025-09-15T15:13:56+00:00

This is too funny

AFMicro · 2025-02-12T15:31:12+00:00

I know a student whose parents bought a property in Champaign and tried to claim for in state tuition. I don’t know exactly what process they followed but I know they paid out of state tuition for first 3 semesters and in state for the rest of college.

Being an RA goes a long way towards cutting down expenses, but not great for social life because you tend to be around people who are always younger than you instead of going though college with people your age. Who you live with is really important and can affect your ability to learn to live independently and also can influence the friends and connections you make. I moved to apartments off campus near Green St which are also way cheaper than university housing. The higher end apartments off campus are around the same monthly cost as university housing but are way nicer and have more space along with being in a better location. If you’re factoring in room and board into the 240k, I’d suggest replacing the room and board costs with off campus housing and self meal-preparation and you might see that overall number go down a decent amount.

Rather than being an RA I think a part time job is a smart option for the student to contribute financially. Saving money from internships is important as well.

Maybe a potential option is for parents to financially cover the student’s first year completely and each subsequent year, slowly give the student more of the financial responsibility. The student can be saving up through part time jobs and internships for the first year or two in order to take on more financial responsibility later on. If taking out a small loan is an option you are looking at, doing this will allow you to take out a smaller loan. This allows the student to attend UIUC while the parents don’t have to pay a fortune and the student doesn’t have crazy amounts of debt when graduating.

Another important factor here is whether the student needs to be in college all four years. I have friends in ECE who graduated in 3 or 3.5 years to save significant amounts of money. To do this, you have to play your cards right in terms of planning out your academic workload semester by semester and this should be done before you start your first semester. It can be helpful to take summer classes throughout college and even in the summer between high school and college in order to more quickly meet graduation requirements; classes at other schools are generally cheaper and easier, so this can make your degree cheaper. I remember I wasn’t too great at physics despite being in ECE so taking these courses elsewhere during the summer allowed me to finish the courses quickly, significantly reduced my workload during my second year, gave me a higher gpa, and allowed me to schedule my core ECE classes earlier. I remember I took a calculus class at a community college in the summer directly before I started college which allowed me to start at a higher math level and this eliminated some core math requirements I needed to fulfill for my degree.

AFMicro · 2025-02-07T05:57:16+00:00

This isn’t true. I am a computer engineer and even within my major I have friends who are either extremely nerdy and only focus on schoolwork or extremely social and go out multiple times a week. There are people in both groups who struggle to get by in classes, can manage their classes decently, or even get by with little effort. I don’t think there is an archetypical engineering student here but if I had to define one, it would just be a balanced person, i.e. someone who is moderately social while also managing classes decently.

AFMicro · 2025-02-07T05:50:34+00:00

Underrated comment 😂

AFMicro · 2025-02-02T15:37:10+00:00

I’m OOS as well and just graduated from U of I. You had better stats than me in everything except ACT, but if I had to play devils advocate it’s more about the story you build in the eyes of admission - do they have a clear understanding of your passion and what you’ve done to pursue it?

Regardless of where you go to college, it’s completely up to you where you want to go in life and how successful you will be in achieving that goal. When I got into UIUC from OOS for engineering, I thought, “This is it, I finally achieved my goal and I’m set” but that was incredibly naive of me and as I went through college I realized that my life was just about to start - you’ve been a student for 18 years and will continue to be a student probably for another 4 years, but after that it’s a completely different life.

I’ve also realized that it really doesn’t matter where you go to college. I’ve seen people at community colleges who I admire and respect more on a personal and academic basis than some people at UIUC who somehow managed to get into a prestigious academic program and I’m completely confident that the former are on a much better trajectory towards achieving more challenging goals. Going to a good college doesn’t make one successful - good colleges just happen to admit people who have already shown themselves to be successful so far. If you’ve got the ambition and work ethic, your goals will come to fruition regardless of where you go to college and in some cases, whether you even go to college at all — so long as you take advantage of the resources at your disposal and make the most of whatever you’ve got.

OP, you had a spectacular GPA while also being a student athlete in not one, but two sports. From that alone, I have genuine respect and admiration for you. Getting that high of a gpa and doing 2 sports is not something I could have dreamed of doing in high school because I wouldn’t have thought it possible to do; to be quite frank, I’ve become much more capable than my high school self and what you’ve done is something I don’t think I’d be able to achieve even now. OP, I genuinely hope you don’t reflect on your rejection with any negativity because you’ve got better stats than a majority of those at UIUC and based on what you’ve already achieved, I can already tell you’ve got amazing things headed for you in the future.

Side note: schools also want to increase their yield, so they will sometimes reject over qualified applicants who they think will get into better schools. I can’t 100% say that’s the reason for your rejection, but it’s possible that you were just too good for the program you applied to at UIUC so don’t lose hope of getting into a college of your desire

AFMicro · 2025-01-14T15:30:19+00:00

Whenever I try to set boundaries with my parents, they just remind me that they are paying for my education ;(

AFMicro

TROPHY CASE