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How can a computer science graduate student spend his time efficiently at a graduate school to work on as much projects as much as possible?

  • I have recently joined New York University as a graduate student in the computer science department. It's only been 15 days that i came here,but was unable to figure out the best way to spend time here to learn coding and do projects. I am expecting answers from the students who graduated or still in college or professors about how to do spend my time efficiently. My goal is to improve my coding skills,personality & do a lot of projects and get an internship with major tech company. PS : I have 2 years of work exp and I am a mediocre coder. I have good knowledge of ds & algo.

  • Answer:

    Do not try to work on as many projects as possible. In most such cases, the student ends up doing a shoddy job on those projects, which is worse than not having started. Take the smallest number of projects you can (including course projects) and try to excel in them. Check with the advisor(s) often to make sure you are moving in the right direction. If you are a computer science graduate student without a reasonable programming background and are planning to get a job with a major technology company, this is going to be tough. Top 15-20% of CS undergraduate students tend to have reasonable programming background, in many cases backed up by summer internships at technology companies. You might need to catch up with them, at the minimum, as the interview process is usually no different for graduate students. Pick one language (usually Java or C++) and good books on algorithms and data structures. What to do next is covered in several Quora threads. I'd also recommend two books on problem-solving and interviewing: "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" and "Elements of Programming Interviews: 300 Questions and Solutions" (the latter is more advanced and has more technical material).

Igor Markov at Quora Visit the source

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Just curious: how is being a senior student relevant for the time-managemtn question? My $0.02 below: Sit down. Evaluate what you're doing and how much time this costs you on a weekly basis (include eating, sleeping, personal care, recreation - yes, you DO need that - etc). Evaluate what you want to do and guesstimate what time it will cost you (again, include eating, sleeping, personal care etc). Now prioritize all things written down from both lists. And now for the easy (and, at the same time hardest) part: drop everything that does not fit within the time you have got (168 hours per week) and tell people around you that you will NOT do those anymore. Repeat this process every time you feel that others are determining your calendar... Personally I used to do this about twice a year. Note that step 5 is hard, but rewarding. You have now given yourself a firm basis to say "NO", which is key to time-management!

Gerard Wassink

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