What does it take to be a computer student?

What are valuable steps for a college student majoring in Computer Information Systems to take before they graduate from their university?

• Please add any: career tips, networking tips, technical skills suggestions. I have heard things such as create a GitHub account, join meetups in your speciality to network with other professionals, get a mentor, contribute to stackoverflow, join a startup, start a blog, etc. What are other tips? or would you please elaborate on any of the tips listed above. The most frequently heard advice is about GitHub but what should one do to make it valuable? What type of code repositories should they strive to build? In regards to mentoring. What are good tips to finding the most qualified mentors?

• Answer:

  The most important thing is to work an internship.  Work experience and people who can vouch for you goes a long way.  It also opens up opportunities in networking, mentorship, and open source contribution.  Internships can be at big companies or smaller companies, both will do.  I personally prefer the results at a small company or startup, as it will probably enable you to have more impact and give you more exposure into the industry rather than just the company.  Big companies can be nation-states unto themselves, with a separate fiefdom for the interns.  Smaller companies tend to have less separation and also are, out of necessity, more connected with other companies in the industry.  Interning at a company with single or low-double digits engineers means that grabbing a beer with a coworker after work more likely will result in meeting other people (often in the industry, aka "networking".) Bonus points if the internship is somewhere that you don't live or go to school.  A lot of the value with internships is the networking opportunities in the community.  When you work in a place where you already have a social network in place, you're not as incentivized to network organically.  It's a lot easier to hang out with existing friends for fun and treat "networking opportunities" as a different game when you're around your existing friends.  When your alternative to going to the meetup or hanging out with coworkers/other people you met in the field is looking at pictures of cats alone in your apartment, this networking thing starts to look pretty good. Networking gets a bad rap because it can be played as a game where the goal is to shake as many hands, exchange the most business cards, or meet only the most important people at an event.  The true goal of networking is relationship building, which is undermined when you only do it for career advancement or other obvious personal benefits.  Serendipity is a very powerful force that can't work when a clear gameplan is in play.  Don't be that douchebag. Mentorship is kind of complicated.  I'm most likely the wrong person to speak on this topic, though I've had several people who at various points I would consider my mentors.  They all came to be fairly organically with people I was working with or who I had met where we developed a mutual respect.  At least for me, I was never in a master/apprentice situation with clear roles and responsibilities.  I just tried to learn from those who were more experienced and smarter than me.  I think it's worked out fairly well for me so far. GitHub. Ah, GitHub.  Your github profile is a complex and personal work.  The idealist in me discourages looking at it as a purely career-oriented list of impressive demonstrations.  Programming is a creative pursuit where the cost of trying something is very low, and the consequence of failure on personal projects is usually just a good amount of learning that can be applied on future projects.  My github has projects that I started because I wanted to learn about some technology, projects that I wrote to make my life easier in someway, fun little bits of code that I thought would be whimsical at the time, and (more commonly lately) libraries written to accomplish tasks at my job that had more general applicability.  There is some code I am proud of, some really shitty code, some failed experiments, and a few things that others have found useful.  My general approach is that if there isn't a compelling reason not to share something, then I share it on github.  I wish I had time to share more things.  It is a huge red flag to me when I talk to developers who work on side projects (oftentimes ones I can demo), but have absolutely no github (or other open source) presence.  Seeing something in code gives me at least a sense of your personal style and approach to programming.  It doesn't have to be perfect or monumental; it just has to convey something.