Starting your B.tech In CSE or IT? Consider all these.....

1. Teach yourself how to learn: First and foremost, college is not like school. Faculties won’t spoon-feed. There are no set questions that could appear in your life after college. You have to go DEEP. Whatever you study in college will mostly be irrelevant to the job you will end up doing. The subject CHEMISTRY that’s mandatory for first year students? Well, that’s cow dung. You don’t use chemistry anywhere in your CS career, and even if you end up using chemistry, the chemistry you study in college as part of first year won’t help you. So, one of the most important things you have to learn is how to learn. This is a crucial skill and if you get to a place where you can teach yourself anything with the help of resources online (and CS doesn’t even need a college), you will be good to go.

2. TOOLS: Familiarise yourself with C, C++, and Python programming languages. For most purposes, C++ and Python would be enough these days. What’s important though is that you understand that these are merely languages that are used to communicate with the computing system. At the core of all this is what goes on in the background, how things are communicated, how you can communicate to the system to get what you want done. Different languages work for different purposes, and based on your interest, you can further refine and focus on a particular set of languages and tools. Until then C, C++ and Python should help you sufficiently.

3. INTERNSHIPS: From your first year summer, try to go and intern at a startup or a research lab in the country, or even outside the country through exchange programs such as MITACS, Globalink, Bose scholarship program, etc. Try and acquire real life experience of whatever it is that you want to do. Be it software development, data analytics, data science, or research in any CS area and publishing the research - whatever it is, go and acquire experience in the real world. It helps to try your hand at different things during different holiday periods (winter/summer/4 years) so that you will know exactly where you want to go and what you want to do by the time you graduate.

4. PUBLISH: Whatever you do, it’s good to get your work published. It’s better if you could publish in international tier-1 journals, but equally respectable journals are also great. A couple years down the road after graduation, if you suddenly wanna try your hands at a PhD or a master’s degree, these publications will definitely help. And you will most certainly not get an admit at atleast the top 20 universities in US/Canada/Europe, without any publication record, at least not for research driven programs. If you develop a sudden interest in research and you wanna try your hand at it, and you also want to do it at a reputable institution, it’s a must to have a previous research work and publication track record.

5. BUILD RELATIONSHIPS: More often than not, the professors you work with, the people who mentor you in your internship, the PI’s and post-docs at the research lab, all of these people are going to be important somewhere down the line. It’s important to build a close working and professional relationship with such people who can shape your career, even if you can’t see how. These would be people who could help you connect with a company for recruitment drives, professors who could put a word for you at a research lab, mentors who would recommend you for admission if you plan for masters or PhD. Don’t discard these people and relationships as unimportant.

6. GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE: If you’re from a tier-2 or a tier-3 college, or if you’re from India, any college except IIT, do go out of your college for internships in other premiere institutions such as IIT, IISC, etc., and connect with influential professors, work with them in their research projects, get to a level where they would be willing to recommend you in case you decide to go for post-graduate studies. This is crucial and important, and even if you just decide to go to job and stick to the job, these relationships are often priceless and continue for a long time.

7. BUILD: In your spare time, always keep building. You don’t necessarily need to be a competitive coder in order to attain success with your BTech CSE degree. You can pick up quantitative finance and dabble in the stock markets with your math and computation knowledge. You can pick up computational neuroscience and do simulations, build models, and solve some cool stuff. You can pick up Data Science and Statistics related skills and go ahead and solve some pressing problems at big companies through platforms like Kaggle.
   
   There are a lot of things you can do. Just do a surface level study of what everything you can do entails - and then pick one that sounds like something that would make you wanna forego eating and sleeping. And go build yourself alongside in that particular niche. By the time you get to your 4th year, you’d be close to being an intermediate, and some even get to expert level, atleast for a college student.

8. Don’t get emotionally attached to anyone: I spent a lot of time (thousands of hours) for people in college, helping everyone around, having fun, roaming around aimlessly, spending time pointlessly, handing things to people that they could have done for themselves, helping them cutshort to finale. In the process, I didn’t spend enough time on my goals, didn’t spend enough time getting to know myself, getting to know what I wanted to learn and engage in.
   
   Sometimes, some people I was emotionally tangled with had the power to throw me off path, catch me off guard, and derail my progress - which they did now and then. All this took me away from pursuing knowledge and wisdom, spending time on frivolous things which looking back, never mattered, for people who didn’t last.
   
   4 years after college, everyone who was a priority to me back in college, is nowhere to be found, only to realize that I was never anyone’s priority and that I was just being used as a first bench, regular attendance person who lends notes and teaches before exams.
   
   By all means, do cultivate relationships, network the heck out of it, make connections, but before all this - take care of yourself, your goals, your ambition, your dreams.

9. Travel: Every two months or so, travel to all the nearby places from your college, one after the other. Travel builds essential survival skills, patience, and helps you flourish socially. It also trains you in coming out of your comfort zone every now and then to venture into places you’re not familiar with. While traveling, meet new people, make new connections, and try and keep in touch with few whom you really admire. Traveling not only teaches you important life lessons, it helps you unwind after months of hard work, to help you get back to work with renewed vigor. You could also consider traveling for internships, research work, conferences etc., as an unwinding trip. It pays to do those things and travel without spending much from your end (as colleges sponsor for conferences, and companies sponsor for internship relocation in some cases)

10. Pick up new skills: Don’t approach your college life as a linear, CS only, career building exercise. I wish I had picked up finance and investing skills back in my undergrad time, coz I later found out I actually liked Finance, Quant Finance, and Trading/Investing. I also wish I’d dedicated more time on exploring Statistics, Data Science, and Data Analytics. I applied for MS in Computer Science programs in the US, EU, and Canada. I got rejected by all the colleges I applied to, irrespective of a very good profile because of one thing - lack of research publications and lack of strong, well known recommenders from brand name schools. Whether it is research, or data science, or even exploring computer architecture - whatever intrigues you even a little bit, go full on and explore it - atleast until you know you don’t want to go further, picking up new skills along the way.

11. A word about romantic relationships: Having someone to love, falling in love, experiencing butterflies and all that is fine. I sincerely wish I’d spent more time on myself, skill building, exploring different fields, rather than on people. Especially when it comes to a romantic relationship, it takes a lot of your time, effort, and emotional and mental energy. You’d be better off investing that time on yourself. Once you get out of college, there will be a lot of opportunities to meet, date, and settle down. While in college, maintain healthy friendships, but go after your dreams first.

Every other obvious suggestion - that CGPA absolutely matters, it pays to graduate with a CGPA above 9, it pays to have research publications, time management is important, college friends won’t come so far, most people are temporary, your skills are permanent, etc., are already mentioned. So, I have refrained from saying those and given some suggestions I think are important. If I went back in time, I’d say my past self all these things and hope he’ll be better than I am right now.

-Shravan Venkataraman