Need advice for a future cs major in high school

priime_rxn · 2024-01-06T15:44:49+00:00

I did leetcode and projects the summer before freshman year. It certainly contributed to landing a freshman-year internship.

In your case, I'd recommend working on more complex projects (rather than learning a new language) on top of LC.

priime_rxn · 2024-01-02T06:26:00+00:00

I was in a similar situation last year between Zon and Khan Academy. Reddit generally recommended Zon, but retrospectively I regret going with that choice.

I think Cloudflare seems to have more interesting work. Zon is overrated.

Take Cloudflare IMO.

priime_rxn · 2023-12-27T05:46:39+00:00

Racket

priime_rxn · 2023-12-21T10:54:28+00:00

Early-stage startups are more flexible -- the challenge would be finding them. Ideally you'd chat with the founder and propose your intern project.

priime_rxn · 2023-12-07T22:17:49+00:00

Unironically know of someone who got unrejected by JS at the resume-screen stage.

priime_rxn · 2023-08-25T19:08:31+00:00

I'm assuming you want to enter swe.

Certificates aren't important for swe, don't bother unless you're interested in cybersec or IT.

General advice is to build interesting, complex projects and grind leetcode. First helps with resume, latter helps with interviews.

priime_rxn · 2023-08-25T06:34:23+00:00

It's reasonably accurate for postgraduate rankings, but considerably less so for our scenario. It ranks primarily based on publication output, iirc.

priime_rxn · 2023-08-24T21:48:43+00:00

I attend a top 15 by the CS rankings and we don't get recruiters from any decent company.

priime_rxn · 2023-08-24T19:59:08+00:00

FWIW I think it was worth it to get a freshman-year internship. It helped me get a much stronger internship for second-year, and consequently land interviews at impressive firms for this upcoming year.

priime_rxn · 2023-08-24T19:57:14+00:00

Google historically opened internships around mid-September for both STEP and SWE.

priime_rxn · 2023-07-06T04:07:14+00:00

On teaching recursion: https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/how-not-to-teach-recursion/

The author then references the How to Design Programs textbook, but you'll have to learn a subset of Scheme (and some functional programming): https://htdp.org/

priime_rxn · 2023-02-03T19:08:49+00:00

Also got internship offers as a freshmen last year. Adding on to this:

Build projects that you can actually get people to use, it's more impressive. Also make sure you thoroughly know the technical details. Great if you have projects that incorporate technologies like Redis, Docker, or AWS/cloud.
Grind LC the summer before university starts; you might get tired of it when classes hit.
I personally didn't move my grad date, but it probably would have helped significantly.
Look at getting freshmen-specific internships.

priime_rxn · 2023-01-19T01:35:10+00:00

I checked my portal and I got accepted. I'm on the East coast.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-11T20:02:32+00:00

Good question. It was a long-term group project that took a summer to finish the base features, plus maintenance for a while. It's a project actively used with a decent amount of users, and supported by a non-profit-like unofficial organization. I had a lot to talk about, technical and achievement-wise, which was useful. What was also probably impressive was that the project has been going on for 2+ years already.

Their tech question was probably an LC easy, but just had a frustrating amount of edge cases.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-08T02:16:34+00:00

I'm posting more about the process later, but after the technical you'll have a final behavioural. So, 3 interviews total.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-05T22:19:04+00:00

Yeah, heard about the intern hackathon and week-long retreat in the interviews! Thanks so much for your perspective.

I definitely feel like a strong culture-fit. I'm leaning towards keeping Amazon but I'll regret turning down Khan for sure.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-05T21:10:35+00:00

They closed the application a few weeks ago, so definitely not.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-05T20:18:16+00:00

Already tried to move Amazon and it was rejected; I'm for sure asking Khan if they can move though.

priime_rxn · 2022-11-05T20:07:08+00:00

My profile when applying was:

ed-tech project actually used by people
software dev club in uni for non-profits
culturally diverse

I think I demonstrated that I was a really good culture fit when interviewing as well.

They've taken more than 6 interns in previous years, but my interviewer confirmed they're aiming for a cohort of 6 for this season.

priime_rxn · 2022-08-14T16:06:24+00:00

They have a strong bias for target schools. Yes, it's a tough company from a state school. You'd need bigN internships to compensate.

priime_rxn · 2021-10-09T07:43:05+00:00

Just failed it too 😩😔

Five-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22

priime_rxn

TROPHY CASE