CS Career question: Career fair coming up, do I have a chance? - Developers

So I go to community college, and am in my 2nd year. I've got a 3.08 GPA. Basically, I want work of some kind or another. I've got these projects to show for it: [url]http://github.com/proboardslol[/url] My college has shitty CS professors and everybody in my class is at the "intro to java" level (and I don't expect them to get any higher until they transfer to a 4 year university). I'm sort of banking on the hope that the rest of the campus is in the same camp as my classmates and I'm basically one of a few who are ahead of the class. I'm really just wondering what my chances realistically are, given my projects as a sophomore. Also any tips on a career fair? Also we should have a CS Career question thread. [editline]28th September 2015[/editline] also apparently [url=https://github.com/b4x]hot wheels[/url] follows me on github?

I also had introduction to Python class and I kindly asked if he could just give me "the test" and I scored 10/10, not needing to do homework and shit for whole year. Just a hint.

They're all there because they want to hire people (except for the people recruiting for grad school), and most want to hire people straight out of college, and some can be pretty proactive. Idk if this is an outlier, but with my 4th year CS group only like half of them showed up, most were just lazy, some already had jobs lined up, but it's always worth it to go and see what people are offering. Half of it is showing up, the other half is being able to write a sort or implement a stack. Long story short, you'll definitely get interviews, usually get offers, it's just a matter of if you want to work there And even if you're 2nd year, if someone's not willing to promise jobs, they're probably willing to offer internships (which is basically promising a job if you're competent). Some people have jobs their 2/3rd year, just waiting for them to graduate [editline]asd[/editline] regular interview tips apply to job fairs too: Email them the next day with questions to show interest, throw copies of your resume around like candy(or maybe save paper and stick it in a follow-up email), google the companies beforehand, etc

You are looking for an internship at this point. You should really try to get at least 1 internship before you graduate. I did not, but it really helps you to get a better (and higher paying) full time position after school. [quote='proboardslol']My college has shitty CS professors and everybody in my class is at the "intro to java" level (and I don't expect them to get any higher until they transfer to a 4 year university). I'm sort of banking on the hope that the rest of the campus is in the same camp as my classmates and I'm basically one of a few who are ahead of the class. I'm really just wondering what my chances realistically are, given my projects as a sophomore.[/quote] After reading this, it makes you come off as arrogant. Try to be more humble. You probably don't know as much as you think you do. I would really recommend reading cracking the code interview book. It's really good. Also, your github link is giving me a 404 not found.

[QUOTE=brianosaur;48826200]You are looking for an internship at this point. You should really try to get at least 1 internship before you graduate. I did not, but it really helps you to get a better (and higher paying) full time position after school. After reading this, it makes you come off as arrogant. Try to be more humble. You probably don't know as much as you think you do. I would really recommend reading cracking the code interview book. It's really good. Also, your github link is giving me a 404 not found.[/QUOTE] I was extremely aware of how it sounded while I was typing it and I made a very conscious decision with the words I chose. I am not being hyperbolic here. My first semester was shit; the professor was shit. We did zero programming and instead memorized meaningless buzzwords and their weird definitions in his broken English. 10% of the final exam was on Unix commands and programs which my class had no reference for because we spent 0 time doing anything even tangentially related to Unix. In fact, these things were only covered in the last 10 minutes of the last class before the final. When we asked for a study guide for the final (the day before the final), he told us that he hadn't even written it yet. So I transferred to another campus. Much better experience here, but it's community college. You see, the thing about guaranteed admissions in community college is that, while you expect it to be filled with people who want to offset the cost of a 4 year university, it is instead filled with people who hadn't made any progress towards deciding what they want to do with their lives by the time they graduated. So they went to a community college to put off having to go to a real college for an indefinite period of time. So the guys I talk to in my class are like this. They're good at programming, sure, but they're not interested in going beyond what they're taught in class. They don't do any programming outside of homework or projects, and they don't pursue anything technical in their freetime. They're definitely smart, no doubt, but they have no motivation to do any independent study. The downfall of this is that without independent study, a community college graduate is at the same level as a freshman at any respectable 4 year university, so you're forced to either teach yourself what you need to know or accept mediocrity. As it turned out, there were hardly any comp sci students at the job fair, which was good. I don't consider myself to be some sort of fucking superior genius (facepunch has taught me that), but I do know that most of my class doesn't care enough to rise above what they're taught in class. Of course this comes with exceptions. There are a few guys in my class who are beyond that level. There's a guy who sits next to me who actually has a degree in biology, realized it was worthless, and is now back to do comp sci because he learned python while he was in school. This guy is no doubt ahead of me, and is only in the class because he needs to get the credit to transfer to a real college. There's a kid who sat next to me last semester who was programming a text adventure game and worked on it outside of class as well. he was always asking questions not related to the specific subject matter of the class (though they were CS related) because he wanted to implement them in his game. There are tons of people who are better than me, I know this. But what I also know is that by an large the vast majority of American-born community college students are simply unmotivated to do anything beyond what is expected of them because they're not sure of their future or what they're interested in. [editline]4th October 2015[/editline] Also I changed my github name on the recommendation of 4chan github.com/collinoswalt and collinoswalt.github.io Also got an interview with a contractor here in DC. It went well, and I followed up but I have yet to hear from them

[QUOTE=proboardslol;48826384]I was extremely aware of how it sounded while I was typing it and I made a very conscious decision with the words I chose. I am not being hyperbolic here. My first semester was shit; the professor was shit. We did zero programming and instead memorized meaningless buzzwords and their weird definitions in his broken English. 10% of the final exam was on Unix commands and programs which my class had no reference for because we spent 0 time doing anything even tangentially related to Unix. In fact, these things were only covered in the last 10 minutes of the last class before the final. When we asked for a study guide for the final (the day before the final), he told us that he hadn't even written it yet. So I transferred to another campus. Much better experience here, but it's community college. You see, the thing about guaranteed admissions in community college is that, while you expect it to be filled with people who want to offset the cost of a 4 year university, it is instead filled with people who hadn't made any progress towards deciding what they want to do with their lives by the time they graduated. So they went to a community college to put off having to go to a real college for an indefinite period of time. So the guys I talk to in my class are like this. They're good at programming, sure, but they're not interested in going beyond what they're taught in class. They don't do any programming outside of homework or projects, and they don't pursue anything technical in their freetime. They're definitely smart, no doubt, but they have no motivation to do any independent study. The downfall of this is that without independent study, a community college graduate is at the same level as a freshman at any respectable 4 year university, so you're forced to either teach yourself what you need to know or accept mediocrity. As it turned out, there were hardly any comp sci students at the job fair, which was good. I don't consider myself to be some sort of fucking superior genius (facepunch has taught me that), but I do know that most of my class doesn't care enough to rise above what they're taught in class. Of course this comes with exceptions. There are a few guys in my class who are beyond that level. There's a guy who sits next to me who actually has a degree in biology, realized it was worthless, and is now back to do comp sci because he learned python while he was in school. This guy is no doubt ahead of me, and is only in the class because he needs to get the credit to transfer to a real college. There's a kid who sat next to me last semester who was programming a text adventure game and worked on it outside of class as well. he was always asking questions not related to the specific subject matter of the class (though they were CS related) because he wanted to implement them in his game. There are tons of people who are better than me, I know this. But what I also know is that by an large the vast majority of American-born community college students are simply unmotivated to do anything beyond what is expected of them because they're not sure of their future or what they're interested in. [editline]4th October 2015[/editline] Also I changed my github name on the recommendation of 4chan github.com/collinoswalt and collinoswalt.github.io Also got an interview with a contractor here in DC. It went well, and I followed up but I have yet to hear from them[/QUOTE] Welcome to CS! I, too, had terrible teachers who I could barely understand as well. Before deciphering the code they were explaining, I had to decipher what the hell they were even saying in English. I just graduated in May from a no-name state school, and I didn't do much outside of class to better my programming skills until my last year of school. My schedule was all over the place. I was taking business classes, CS classes, and gen-eds mixed, when all I wanted to do is focus on my CS courses. I think that if I just would have went to a community college where I focused on my gen-eds then transferred to a 4 year school, I would have been way better off. However, the fun and experience of living in dorms and all that was invaluable. Many people just take up programming just because you can get a high paying job. Having a passion for programming and CS topics will put you ahead of the game in itself, and that's great. Doing things outside of class will definitely make you shine. Since I didnt have internships to put on my resume, I literally put all my class and personal projects I did, which are all working and functional. Honestly, I had terrible luck at career fairs. I recently just got an a first job and there is so much that school doesn't teach you about the real world in developing software. It is amazing to go to work and code all day, then get paid for it! I didnt mean to be critical of you, but it is important to not sound like your better than others. Everybody has a different level of experience and you have to mind that gap. I hope things go well in your job search, and if you don't get this one in DC, you have lots of time to find something else for this summer.

[QUOTE=Rocket;48826664]Maybe it's not such a great idea to be taking career advice from 4chan.[/QUOTE] /g/ can get pretty terrible at times but I think from a technical sense they know what they're talking about. Plus, it sounded like good advice (putting collinoswalt sounded better than putting proboardslol)

Having out-of-class projects to show is a really good thing to have with these things. With my experience with career fairs, though, a lot of companies seem to pay you a lot more attention in your 3rd+ year than 2nd and 1st year.

Sorry I don't have anything more on-topic to contribute, but... [QUOTE=proboardslol;48777564]also apparently [url=https://github.com/b4x]hot wheels[/url] follows me on github?[/QUOTE] hotwheels is [url=https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv]ctrlcctrlv[/url] on github.

[QUOTE=DrTaxi;48841349]Sorry I don't have anything more on-topic to contribute, but... hotwheels is [url=https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv]ctrlcctrlv[/url] on github.[/QUOTE] Ah. Well someone involved with 8chan follows me

[QUOTE=proboardslol;48842695]Ah. Well someone involved with 8chan follows me[/QUOTE] That little barbecue fork symbol next to the repo name means it's, well, a fork. As with any GitHub repository, anyone can fork the 8chan repository, and that's what this b4x person did. They only made a single commit to this fork, which involved changing some text, and this commit was merged with the main (that is, hotwheels') 8chan repo. So, "involved with 8chan", not really.

oooooh github is hard

[url]https://git-scm.com/doc[/url] ^ good read if you want to learn how to git disciplined some good commands that are extremely useful: [B]git stash[/B] - to stash the way your project is now onto a stack (great if you make messy code and want to go back to how it is on your repo without losing what you had) [B]git stash pop[/B] - to pop off the last changes you stashed [B]git status[/B] - see what files have been changed, what will be committed, etc [B]git diff[/B] - see the differences in your unpushed changes [B]git commit[/B] [B]git push [/B][B]git branch[/B] [B]git checkout[/B] Your commits should be small and focused. You should be using version control through the entire life of the project once you get a little bit of structure in your program, not when it's completely done and you just commit once and be done