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start doing competitive programming as early as you can , enroll in ICPC https://icpc.baylor.edu/ https://icpc.baylor.edu/ and join competitive programming wee

start doing competitive programming as early as you can , enroll in ICPC https://icpc.baylor.edu/ https://icpc.baylor.edu/ and join competitive programming weekly group at you school (or start one if you don't find any) this is a good book for preparation https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Programming-3rd-Steven-Halim/dp/B00FG8MNN8/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=competitive+programming&qid=1590954026&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Programming-3rd-Steven-Ha... participate in contests on https://onlinejudge.org/ https://onlinejudge.org/, topcoder or similar on weekly basis (you will hear a lot about leetcode as a hard prerequisite to getting a job these days, but it's trivial for people who do competitive programming) you will learn much more from doing that for a couple of years than any college can teach you

mikaelmello 6y ago
I second this. Competitive programming helps you develop skills that I find important in a career and that, in my opinion, had a strong influence on my current success. There are many benefits and things where Comp. Programming can help you, but the most obvious one is how interview questions in FAANG (and similar) companies are easy compared to your weekly Comp. Programming contests.
tibbar 6y ago
This. After a couple years of serious effort on Codeforces, algorithms interviews are trivial. And perhaps more importantly, it becomes much easier to bang out a state machine, toss around some data structures, check for edge cases. You'll become really comfortable with that middle tier of software algorithms that are a non-trivial composition of standard ideas, but still fall short of needing a research paper, etc. (And you'll develop a sense for when a problem is actually-hard).
akhilcacharya 6y ago
Biggest regret in college/HS/right now is not getting good at competitive programming.
fish45 6y ago
Yeah I've recently been trying leetcode and codeforces and I'm way worse at it than I'd expected. It's fun though, so I'm working hard to improve. Thanks for your advice!

mikaelmello 6y ago

I second this. Competitive programming helps you develop skills that I find important in a career and that, in my opinion, had a strong influence on my current success. There are many benefits and things where Comp. Programming can help you, but the most obvious one is how interview questions in FAANG (and similar) companies are easy compared to your weekly Comp. Programming contests.

tibbar 6y ago

This. After a couple years of serious effort on Codeforces, algorithms interviews are trivial. And perhaps more importantly, it becomes much easier to bang out a state machine, toss around some data structures, check for edge cases. You'll become really comfortable with that middle tier of software algorithms that are a non-trivial composition of standard ideas, but still fall short of needing a research paper, etc. (And you'll develop a sense for when a problem is actually-hard).

akhilcacharya 6y ago

Biggest regret in college/HS/right now is not getting good at competitive programming.

fish45 6y ago

Yeah I've recently been trying leetcode and codeforces and I'm way worse at it than I'd expected. It's fun though, so I'm working hard to improve. Thanks for your advice!