Research experience (4 years under a well known international experiment), and I utilized everything resource I had available to me at a public university. I t

Research experience (4 years under a well known international experiment), and I utilized everything resource I had available to me at a public university. I taught myself a lot of things, I got free instruction from advisers, I figured the ins and outs of this and that... sometimes at the expense of my actual grades. And the most important thing... I was good at it and people liked me. Ironically, not many physicists are very good programmers, and that's exactly why I got hired for a job. I graduated with a 2.5 GPA (no thanks to ADHD) and now I'm a Software Developer at Stanford. I initially had a hard time finding a job near where I lived (Utah), and no money so I took a part time job for a bit. Oh, and as for the actual courses: Find out who your professor is and what your book will be. Check the course website from the offering professor (or any other professor at your school) the end of the semester before you take it for homework and test solutions. I wrote some data mining scripts that basically googled "book name" + syllabus + test|homework|solutions|answers and scoured the answers for pdfs. This will get you both homework solutions and possible test problems (most professors are unoriginal) Also, search "ism" occasionally as well, as you may get lucky and find the instructors solutions manual. Buddy up with professors and find out where there offices are, as well as your major's library and search for old course books they are throwing away. For non-cs in math/physics/chemistry, if you have a unix account don't be too shy to go ahead and ls -lR ~professor/public_html > jnk.txt.