Howdy. If you attended the Deja News talk, please let me know what
you thought of it and how I could improve the next talk I give.
Here's some random thoughts and advice for students:
Try and get some relevant work experience before you leave school.
It is more beneficial than anything else at landing a job.
It will also help you decide what you like to do, and be a better
job-hunter (i.e. picking out employers that aren't going to screw
you, seeing through headhunter hype, etc.) Trust your instincts.
If it seems like they're trying to gloss over something, they are.
Don't expect work to be full of the fun toy problems you did in school.
Implementing something is about 10x harder than conceiving of it,
and the additional work is _not_ fun, which is why it's frequently
glossed over. Try and find excuses to do fun things, but don't
expect too many, maybe one a month.
Suggest fun, practical projects to your professors. I am thinking
of writing up a list of things that would have been fun to do in school,
and sending it to the relevant professors. For example, how about
suggesting to a software engineering professor that your class develop
a regression testing suite for parts of GNU/Linux or other open-source
Unixes? Why waste your thinkons on throw-away toy problems, when you
could be doing stuff that would benefit society? It will be more work,
but you'll get more out of it. If he or she won't change the plan for
the whole class, ask if he'll make an exception for you. Ask to substitutethe whole
class, ask if he or she can make an exception for you. Ask
if you can do it instead of some equivalent amount of work. They'll
likely be stunned by your initiative (at least relative to other students).
Also, don't be afraid to ask people for stuff. This applies to all
kinds of things; scholastic administrators (same thing), airline ticket
agents, the IRS, etc. Ask different people until you
get what you want. Most of the time, getting what you want is
dependent on asking the right question to the right person.
Sometimes you can just wear them down. :)
--
Travis Hassloch, Resident Tricknologist, Deja News Research Service
We don't program so much as beat the bits into submission with our minds.
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