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Work on an open source project. A real one. Mozilla is super-friendly to new guys, and working on Chromium means working with Google Engineers and other smart
by alexgartrell 17y ago
Work on an open source project. A real one. Mozilla is super-friendly to new guys, and working on Chromium means working with Google Engineers and other smart people.
Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.
You should probably consider working for a medium-sized company. Large companies have a tendency towards being soul crushing places for interns. A strong, almost-all-of-the-time tendency. The only exceptions might be Google or Facebook, but your odds of getting in there with only introductory programming. Most big companies want interns that they can recruit.
- wakeupthedawn 17y agoI'm assuming he's already a senior because she's a National Merit Finalist. Where are you going to college?
- SlyShy 17y agoI'm still waiting to hear back from several schools. Still a week to wait.
- Locke1689 17y agoAlso, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line. Seconded. Going to Northwestern has been a big leg up so far. Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS) may be the difference in getting an interview or not (where you can really show off ;)).
- tokenadult 17y agoAttending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS) Informational question here from an onlooker: What's the recent consensus about which schools are the top twenty or thirty schools in CS, especially for a young person with an interest in start-up Web service work as contrasted with Wall Street or Big Company work?
- wallflower 17y agoStarting a list: Brown, CMU, MIT, Waterloo, BYU, UWashington, Stanford, RPI, Cornell, Cal
- alexgartrell 17y agoFor more of a startup culture, gravitate more towards the coasts. Stanford is probably the best.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Locke1689 17y agoNorthwestern ;) Also, U Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard, Yale (rest of the Ivies), Caltech, UChicago. I'm sure that there are others. Personally I'm a big proponent of the liberal arts education so I'd probably put schools with very good general programs closer to the top, but that's my personal belief.
- python123 17y agoLOL BYU?? Is that a joke? Or are you just clueless?
- Locke1689 17y agoDamn man, your account is only 30 days old and you're already at -3 karma? Shooting for a record or something?
- tokenadult 17y agoThe credited way to disagree with a statement that some computer science department is a top-thirty department is to name thirty other departments that are better, with rationale.
- RevRal 17y agoEven if wallflower made a mistake, that would be no reason to be disrespectful.
- SlyShy 17y agoI'll do that. I've contributed to some small projects, but I was psyching myself out from working on big open source projects. There are probably all sorts of bugs that would be tedious for the experienced coders to fix, so that's probably a good place to start?