What should I do or learn to better prepare myself for a co-op position?

Question

I'm currently taking computer systems in a technical institute and I will start looking for a coop job by next September. Since summer vacation is only a few weeks away, I was wondering what I should learn or do to help me land a job and do well in it.

I'm pretty sure I'm ahead of most of my classmates since I got around 1.5 years "head start." For now, I'm planning to learn how to use source control (git - for no reason really) and was actually thinking of learning Scheme through SICP and maybe build something nice with it at the end.

On the other hand, I'm wondering if it's better to expand on what I know right now and I'm thinking of C++ since I enjoy it a lot more than others like Java.

Can I get advice on this? thanks!

Answer 1

Should be on careeroverflow, however, you should talk to your prospective employer and ask them what they would value. They will probably give you something quite specific which you'll be able to use when you start. It has the added benefit of making you look very proactive.

Answer 2

If you are looking to prepare for an undetermined co-op position, I wouldn't spend time learning Git or Scheme, as you won't find many shops using either, though Git is slowly gaining. My customers are still using M$ VSS internally, and SVN externally.

I'd learn a nice scripting language that is a bit more mainstream with a great API, like Ruby, Perl or Python, if you want to build something slick in a short time to impress them. If they hand you some sort of data analysis project, that would be perfect for it. But all your plans will probably be forgotten on the first day when you are assigned some odd task that someone else has been avoiding, and who knows what it could be, maybe writing test cases. Good luck, hopefully you get some fun from it.