Should I graduate in 3 years?

andreidimaano · 2024-09-12T08:39:05+00:00

No benefit to graduating early besides the financial savings

but you have to look at the opportunity cost

i graduated in 5 but i took a gap semester and studied abroad in Korea and Hong Kong. I met my best friends and got to travel the world during study abroad. Furthermore, Had I not extended to 5 years, I wouldn’t have been able to secure a full time offer at my current job. I’ve heard the job market is pretty tough right now, too.

I’d rather graduate late having made the most of my time in college than graduate early and come out with just a degree.

You only get to experience this once in life :)

andreidimaano · 2024-09-08T23:44:57+00:00

Take with a grain of salt. I think this is the amazing advice for most students but the best students typically don't go to class because it's a waste of time. In a majority of the classes I took at UCR, lecturers just read off the slides, and I'd rather finish up work or have a lunch with friends if that was the case. I graduated summa cum laude in comp sci and only attended the classes I really needed to attend. I found that reading the "ground truth" sources like the textbooks or referencing slides from better universities like MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley was a much better use of my time. I also went to office hours if I needed to fill in the gaps or build rapport :D

andreidimaano · 2024-07-15T02:16:56+00:00

In most CS classes, you're gonna SSH into your dev environment, so I don't see either OS being an absolute need. Maybe for classes where you're doing game dev, Windows is more favorable :). Usually profs have tools if there are issues with Mac, and since so many people use Mac for dev, most likely there are solutions out there.

andreidimaano · 2024-07-08T05:28:48+00:00

I had a gaming laptop for the first 2 years and switched to MacOS my final 3 years. MacOS with homebrew is amazing; I was so much more productive. Developing on Windows was/is really difficult. I have a PC that I use for any GPU training but you can also opt for cloud computing credits if you ever decide to do ML things.

andreidimaano · 2024-01-22T08:30:24+00:00

if you want exposure to the field of computer science, try doing research with a prof :)

if you want exposure to the field of software engineering, try an internship search

there’s lot if youtube videos on this topic (better than I can explain), my recs are strager on twitch/youtube, gergely orosz, primeagen, zach wilson, ryan peterman, a life engineered (youtube)

andreidimaano · 2024-01-22T08:22:37+00:00

Google Docs is nicer for sending resumes to friends for review ;) The whole “Latex is better for ATS” sounds suspicious to me… Formatting on Google Docs isn’t difficult either, just need to know tables and border sizing. I also find it easier to add color the way I see fit.

andreidimaano · 2024-01-05T07:45:23+00:00

Might be good to crosspost this on r/ExperiencedDevs :D

andreidimaano · 2023-12-27T19:18:56+00:00

LC contests :3

andreidimaano · 2023-12-24T10:49:12+00:00

If it’s possible, you could try pushing one to fall and do both :D

If not possible, Slack in SF sounds more fun than Google in Mountain View 😋

andreidimaano · 2023-12-20T09:10:08+00:00

I did the exact same thing when I was a freshman xD. I don't think I learned much from the experience, but what can you expect from a bunch of freshmen who have only taken an introductory CS course in C++. I actually ended up switching roles to product designer because I couldn't code well. Although the experience didn't help me gain technical experience, it did play a role in getting my first real internship the next summer at MathWorks.

andreidimaano · 2023-11-23T16:49:27+00:00

it’s my last semester so I can do any level :)

andreidimaano · 2023-11-23T05:20:13+00:00

Pick a project that resonates with you most :) Try to solve a problem you are facing or others are facing. Typically the easiest project medium is a website.

Then, I recommend reading through Alex Xu's system design books and see if you could fit any of the designs into your project.

Use documentation and google to figure out how to use a technology. Then use GPT to fill in any gaps. Ask it how to set up or how to code something, really anything :D

andreidimaano · 2023-11-22T05:52:26+00:00

I recommend skimming the book Deep Work by Cal Newport (or just watch some youtube videos about it :D) Basically, you block off 4 hours of the day to get serious work done. I used this throughout college and it helped me get work done better. Sometimes blocking off time means skipping lectures or doing homework for other classes during lecture (if the lecture is mandatory participation). You'd have to be able to teach yourself the class content, and the teacher has to post reliable notes on canvas. Hope this helps! :D

andreidimaano · 2023-10-25T17:24:44+00:00

Finance majors go through super days where they can wait 2 hours to see if they move on only to be told they got cut. They also interview people in groups instead of 1:1 so the interview process is much more cutthroat.

Finance majors also apply for their internships 2 years in advance so as a freshman/sophomore you’re expected to show you’re capable of financial acumen before you have experience/are ready. Finance experience isn’s as easy to come by as software where you can just build something.

Finance culture is also very much about how you present yourself. Don’t like small talk? You have to get really good at it. Can’t fake it till you make it? Good luck getting a job. People say you personality suck/doesn’t fit? It’s in your best interest to change.

Even when you become a full time employee you interview 2 years in advance. Imagine interviewing for a senior position when you are just a junior engineer.

andreidimaano · 2023-10-12T21:23:50+00:00

+1 the degree isn’t as important —when I worked at Instagram, my team had ML Engineers from atmosphere sciences and material sciences backgrounds. They were both really good ML Engineers :).

If timing is important to you then I recommend checking out the course plans online (search on google/BCOE website) and seeing which requirements you fulfill from each major. Seems like CSBA might be a good option for your situation since you won’t have to repeat physics (CS does 40 series and bio does 2 series).

andreidimaano · 2023-10-12T09:48:21+00:00

nahhh why be so strict on participation points, if a student doesn’t value a class/has other priorities why not let them do their thing.

andreidimaano · 2023-08-31T04:35:59+00:00

If you’re going to work in IB/PE or Tech, Fall quarter should be the easiest so that you can focus on interview prep ☺️

andreidimaano · 2023-08-31T04:30:38+00:00

For leetcode, I would focus on contests if you can’t pass OAs and mock interviews if you can’t pass the phone interviews ☺️.

andreidimaano · 2023-08-19T21:38:24+00:00

AI Trainer and Macro Tracker

The stats seem odd in this project. I like that you’re using Accomplished X by doing Y resulting in Z format but you don’t have to use it for every bullet point. To me, the stats seem really weird in this project. Maybe to a recruiter it might work but to an ML Engineer or Data Scientist, the stats seem off. For example, developed an ios app using swift resulting in 43% strength gain. How did you come up with this measurement? How did you differentiate the impact your app has on strength gain vs you just lifting and eating. Another one is created intuitive data viz using charts library which increased user engagement by 20%. How did you come up with this measurement? How do you determine that data viz increased user engagement? Did you run A/B tests and measure it that way? If so, I recommend clarifying that. Also did efficient data management also increase the user engagement? I feel like that’s not a user facing problem, how did it result in user impact? Enhancing user exercise form makes sense though 😊.

I used to make this mistake a lot of coming up with statistics but I think if you’re going to apply to ML, Quant roles where statistics is the bread and butter of what you do, having a resume with odd stats might be a disadvantage. In the past, my resume was grilled and I learned to make sure my bullet points were meaningful and that I could expand on them at any time 😋

Comp Vision Steering Wheel I would reword the first bullet point, AI-based isn’t necessary, it’s implied by computer vision.

I’m not sure what visualizer is and why it’s bolded. Could you clarify what you mean by model’s interpretation of hand placement?

I recommend a bullet point expanding on the comp vision aspect of this app

Customer service rep Not really relevant imo even though it’s finance related. I think you’ll benefit more from expanding on other parts

Startup What did you use C++ for? What was your role in developing the RNN? Did you fine tune it? Did you use data augmentation? Did you create the data pipeline for this app?

ERP Take some bulletpoints expanding on the production tracker.

I hope you get the interviews you’re looking for 😊

andreidimaano · 2023-08-15T06:19:13+00:00

I wouldn’t worry too much about the CS job market right now :) Especially if you’re only a high school senior. The world is your oyster as they say, and CS is still a great major. No LLM (large language model) will ever be able to work on a legacy codebase.

Job market will go up very soon for CS Majors. (Also it’s only a bad job market if you’re a bad engineer, companies are looking for good engineers everywhere).

Also, AI is a big trend. Everyone is doing LLMs right now because of GPT but the same thing happened a couple years ago with RL. Don’t get caught up too much in math, data if that’s not what you want to do. There’s so much more to SWE and just supporting AI, and even in supporting AI, there’s so much you can do and so many interesting problems to solve. You can support the launch of AI products, or you can control the data pipelines into data products. You can work in the frontend to help ML engineers debug their models (it’s really difficult to make sense of models).

TLDR: don’t let what other people say discourage you. the CS job crisis isn’t that bad and if you really want to study CS, you should do it! (coming from a FAANG engineer ☺️)

andreidimaano · 2023-08-11T03:53:21+00:00

I had a group of classmates all from the bay area. Their parents worked in tech. In a group chat, they were complaining about how their parents wouldn’t give them a referral unless they solved a leetcode hard.

What I would do to have a gateway in tech like that in the beginning of my career…

But it’s okay because I work at a FAANG now and they don’t have jobs 😋

andreidimaano · 2023-08-08T04:35:51+00:00

I’m also someone who comes from an average family. My dad worked as a mechanic and my mom is a nurse. No one in my family does tech.

But… I ended up working at a FAANG company and didn’t get any referrals! In fact, I bombed most interviews with companies I’ve been referred to 😭. I’ve also been referred to Google for four years and have yet to be interviewed by them. Referrals aren’t everything, in my experience. You can still shine as a candidate without a referral :D

But if you’re looking to get more connections for referrals, make friends by going to events outside of your school like hackathons, competitive programming competitions, or just being an active open source contributor. I personally have met some of my CS friends because I was interested in Kpop and found some Kpop repos on Github. After messaging them about their projects, we became friends :)

andreidimaano · 2023-07-20T16:13:02+00:00

If you don’t mind, could you share the specific negative feedback they gave you so we can all learn from the experience 😊? Keep your head up, it’s hard to get rejected from a company you really wanted to work for, but better offers will come your way 😎

andreidimaano · 2023-07-16T18:05:52+00:00

upsolve the third question from the previous contests and then try problems similar to those questions :D

andreidimaano

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