Fastlane as a CS student. How do I maximize my time in college

[SpongeGod]

Anybody here studying CS in college? I recently transferred from Mech Engineering to CS just because I think you can fastlane it better. Any advice for someone who's going to be stuck in college for 3 more years. I'd also appreciate some discussion in this thread to the amount fastlane opportunities in CS. So many successful software start-ups have been created to address real human needs ex: find shelter(so many housing apps in new york), food(grubhub, ubereats, postmates), love (tinder, bumble). The opportunities seem endless.

I know some general advice would be keep grades up by reading the lecture readings before class and apply for internships, but is there anything else that I can do to not waste my time.

To be honest, I'd rather not go to college. I've been reading Seth Godin's book Linchpin and he says that if you want a job with more responsibility, you have to show not tell. Resumes just give you readers reasons to not hire you (you do not have so and so experience). Instead, if you have awesome projects or an amazing blog, you exude value to employers that they have no choice but to hire you. If I had my way, I'd drop out and work a minimum wage job while learning cs on the side and apply to jobs after a year of hard work.

Honestly, not sure if I even want to do cs. Why study cs when I can learn marketting and sell this software? I'd still make a lot of money doing that (probably more) and going to college for a CS degree would be useless.

Advice would be appreciated.

 

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[Actionary]

The examples of successful apps/businesses you gave are all unicorns.
They are iconic apps which stand a top thousands of other apps, and startups that have gone bust and dreams have been forgotten about.

About College:
College will train you to become a good employee.
The people who excel in this, can be come specialized, or self employed (doctors, lawyers,etc) but that still is tied to your own time.

Even if you succeed as a Programmer, you would still be trading time for money, and the any business revolving around your time wouldn't scale.

If your time/labor is required to make money, it's a liability. You can get sick, you can get older, the market can change their evaluation of your skillset and so on. (False security)

You can easily build a business while you're in school, in fact its an advantage that you don't have enough time to invest. You are at a time where you don't have much responsibilities so their are less risk involved. Find ways to make the business profitable without much time input from you. Automate, Delegate, Make Connections. Find people you can trust to create a "system" that runs the business.

In due time, you will have a business that makes money while you sleep, or study.
It's easier said than done, but its more guaranteed than running from job to job or trend-hopping to the latest "top job" for a false sense of security.

Make a business that doesn't require you trading your time for money, and you will be on your way to the fastlane.

No trends, tricks or gimmicks are required.
Good luck.

 

[luniac]

mechanical engineering is much more hardcore than typical CS.

if you actually legit learn something in mechanical engineering, you can potentially get into business with very high barrier of entry.
you could invent something that solves a need, something physically real and not virtual.

 

[Mr4213]

Anybody here studying CS in college? I recently transferred from Mech Engineering to CS just because I think you can fastlane it better. Any advice for someone who's going to be stuck in college for 3 more years. I'd also appreciate some discussion in this thread to the amount fastlane opportunities in CS. So many successful software start-ups have been created to address real human needs ex: find shelter(so many housing apps in new york), food(grubhub, ubereats, postmates), love (tinder, bumble). The opportunities seem endless.

I know some general advice would be keep grades up by reading the lecture readings before class and apply for internships, but is there anything else that I can do to not waste my time.

To be honest, I'd rather not go to college. I've been reading Seth Godin's book Linchpin and he says that if you want a job with more responsibility, you have to show not tell. Resumes just give you readers reasons to not hire you (you do not have so and so experience). Instead, if you have awesome projects or an amazing blog, you exude value to employers that they have no choice but to hire you. If I had my way, I'd drop out and work a minimum wage job while learning cs on the side and apply to jobs after a year of hard work.

Honestly, not sure if I even want to do cs. Why study cs when I can learn marketting and sell this software? I'd still make a lot of money doing that (probably more) and going to college for a CS degree would be useless.

Advice would be appreciated.

Let me ask you this. You say your goal is to be an entrepreneur right? So why are you talking/reading books about getting jobs with more responsibilities? Why are you talking about creating great projects/blogs with the goal of showing value to employers so you can get a good job? Your post sounds like you're trying to use entrepreneurship to get a good job? Do you see the problem with this?

First off, I could go on a long rant about the problems with blogs. But that isn't the point. Lets just pretend you did create a great successful value providing blog that generated tons of money for you. Would you really show that to some employers so you can get a job making less money that also requires you to give up your freedom? Hell no you wouldn't, at least I hope you wouldn't. If you created a successful business you'd be the employer, not try to become an employee. People with degrees would be doing all this BS to show you why they are the best person to work for you.

College certainly has benefits and the choice to go depends on the person. I'm not bashing it. But I dropped out. Because it was taking my focus and time away from pursuing what I really wanted to do. It was a distraction and the only reason I went in the first place was because I was afraid I would fail in business and be considered a failure in societies eyes by not having a degree.

Plus, the majority of people come out with huge student loans and then are forced to spend years just to pay it off. In my eyes, this is just a time waster and it limits your freedom to create the life you really want.

If your goal deep down in your soul is to be an entrepreneur, why are you trying to make entrepreneurship revolve around your college schedule? It sounds like you want to do it, but also you kind of don't at the same time, you're just kind of ehh about it. If that was your real goal in your soul, more important than anything, why are you making it secondary? Is your dream to be an entrepreneur? Then why are you placing your dreams to the side to pursue college?

If for whatever reason you think college genuinely helps you to accomplish your goal as an entrepreneur and that is the only reason you are there, then go for it. You won't get any hate from me. If it aligns with your goal, then do it.

But perhaps is it something else? Is it that you arent really wanting to be an entrepreneur right now? Or maybe that you're afraid to really go for it so you want that plan b?

 

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[Ragnar_]

I just graduated with a Business and CS Degree. As far a technical ability, you will learn languages like Java and Python but that's isn't what is important. Approach it from the mindset of learning how to think like a programmer. For example, by the time you have learned deep Java you can easily pick up another language in a week or two.

I had an opportunity to work in a huge companies "Innovation Center," and we had to pick up languages on the fly. I wasn't hired as a programmer, but was able to lead teams because I learned to think like a programmer.

Another piece of advice for programming is never EVER take more then a few weeks off. It's not like riding a bike.. you forget fast. Truth is there is nothing more in this world that scares me more then sitting in cubicle #243 out of 1000 writing code. Which is the reason I decided to take a ton of credits every semester and get a Business Degree too.

As far as bypassing college, I may have if it wasn't for athletics.

 

[sosa067]

Alright, I graduated in late summer 2017 with a B.S. in Computer Science.

I spent my whole time just smoking weed, and playing video games. I never had trouble with the courses or the material, so I didn't put any meaningful effort into studying or using my free time to work on projects, etc.

If I could travel back in time, with the mindset I have now and do it all over again, this is what I would do differently:

1) Utilize Udemy.com - I'm a huge fan of Udemy. If there ever was a technology I wanted to learn, I complete a full course on Udemy first before diving deeper into it. One of the biggest challenges in C.S. is your ability to learn different languages, without having any training or education on it.

For example, my college uses C++ as it's primary language to teach. So for a couple of semesters, we solely used C++, focusing on object orientated programming, and not diving into functional programming, or Python, Java etc. My school was also teaching C++ using extremely old idioms, so we were actually just learning C and not utilizing the core strengths of C++.

Anyways, I've had multiple projects were I've had to learn Java, C# or Python on my own time. Utilizing Udemy.com, or really any other online educational platform, can speed track your way to understanding new tech, languages & frameworks.

Not only that, but the more exposure you have to different technologies, the more solutions you can come up with, for problems in the market.

I mean, just having experience with Web Scraping literally opens a million doors to online business possibilities. Or learning full stack web development, you can start a web development company, or branch into digital marketing via front end web design.

2) Learn Web Development - C.S. can be pretty broad, but one thing it doesn't cover at all, is web development. That's why there's so many coding bootcamps popping up in everywhere. It's not necessarily hard to learn web development either, and my god this is a 100% must have skill.

With just having a basic understanding of web development, you can make side money via upwork, fiverr, fixing errors or implementing small features.

My first freelance job was for $5, implementing google captcha on a website built in like 1800. It was disgusting. My next freelance job was for $50, implementing again, google captcha. This time though, I did it in just 20 minutes, because I had experience doing it before.

Web development is essential especially if you want to get into online business.

3) Balance your time - Okay, I know MJ says in Unscripted that, the irony of balance is that in order to achieve balance, you first must have imbalance in the short term, to achieve balance in the long term. I agree with this. However, college is a unique 4 years of your life.

Do not waste so much time partying, hitting the clubs, and spending your parents money on buying drinks for girls that won't even look at you twice. Trust me dude, it's not worth it.

If I had stopped smoking so much F*cking weed, and gotten so lazy & stale, I would've identified extremely profitable investment opportunities in Bitcoin & Ethereum. Instead, I didn't do any research at all, and didn't even have the mindset that these are possible investment opportunities.

At the same time, don't neglect your social life by staying in all day to study. Networking is really important in life, not just in college, and you need to experience the whole college dynamic. Go meet some girls, go to some parties, college events, and make an effort to make connections.

Don't forget to balance it all out.

 

[Solais]

Anybody here studying CS in college? I recently transferred from Mech Engineering to CS just because I think you can fastlane it better. Any advice for someone who's going to be stuck in college for 3 more years. I'd also appreciate some discussion in this thread to the amount fastlane opportunities in CS. So many successful software start-ups have been created to address real human needs ex: find shelter(so many housing apps in new york), food(grubhub, ubereats, postmates), love (tinder, bumble). The opportunities seem endless.

I know some general advice would be keep grades up by reading the lecture readings before class and apply for internships, but is there anything else that I can do to not waste my time.

To be honest, I'd rather not go to college. I've been reading Seth Godin's book Linchpin and he says that if you want a job with more responsibility, you have to show not tell. Resumes just give you readers reasons to not hire you (you do not have so and so experience). Instead, if you have awesome projects or an amazing blog, you exude value to employers that they have no choice but to hire you. If I had my way, I'd drop out and work a minimum wage job while learning cs on the side and apply to jobs after a year of hard work.

Honestly, not sure if I even want to do cs. Why study cs when I can learn marketting and sell this software? I'd still make a lot of money doing that (probably more) and going to college for a CS degree would be useless.

Advice would be appreciated.

Triage ruthlessly. If some assignment is 3% of your grade and you already have a 97% in the class, and that 3% assignment is going to take at least 15 hours of your precious time, skip it entirely.

Think strategically and you'll find plenty of time to free up. Time management is trial-and-error; anyone who tells you otherwise is bullshitting.

You do CS because CS teaches a very valuable skill. I can train a monkey to do marketing/sales but CS is a whole different story. Just because marketing/sales is useful doesn't mean you can't learn it on your own. It's actually not very difficult.

 

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