Advice for last year college graduates

Question

Hey guys,

I know there are many "advice" questions around this site. But I wanted to to narrow mine down to last year college students, in my case my last year as Master student in computer science. So far is a list of things I've done during my time in college (which I can recommend others to do aswell):

• Code a lot I've written several hobby projects, had part time jobs, entered the Imagine cup from Microsoft, took programming extensive courses and did freelance gigs.
• Read a lot I've bought most top books from the recommended book topics here, to be honest I have not read them all.
• learn different languages I've tried several languages including Haskell, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Prolog, C#, PHP, JS, AS3 and possibly some more I forgot.
• Tried to start a blog Joel recommends to learn how to write, I tried starting a couple of blogs to improve upon this, I gave up on all instances after writing about three posts. It was just not my thing, mainly due to a lack of interesting topics to write about...
• Have a portfolio of launched projects/programs I'm busy with this, have a couple of finished, working projects I worked on to show to people.

So this is my last year. Is there anything else you can recommend a last year college student to do before hitting the job market? Personally I'm tempted to spend my time on the following:

• Practice algorithm design
• Learn and memorize the usage of the low level API's of your favorite language
• Polish your portfolio

Why? Because those first two will make sure you pass the majority of job interviews, here in Holland (I could be wrong). I rather not spend my time on those first two points, but I have to be realistic and thats just my experience on what kind of questions you'll get when you apply. The third point is my hope that I won't have to answer questions about the amount of standard types in c# for example if they can see I get projects done and launched.

But I'm still graduating, so I don't know anything :). Many of you might be hiring grads on a recent base and could tell me and other interested people what you wish that the recent grads you interviewed would have done before they applied.

Answer 1

Continue to write code, create projects that do something interesting, and add them to your portfolio.

The blob thing is worrisome - if you gave them up out of lack of interest ("nobody reads this"), perhaps you haven't found your passion. If the breakdown was because you find it hard to write or explain things, you need to work on that pronto. The number one skill for a programmer by far is communication with other human beings, especially the carbon based life forms that do not have a very good grasp of technological issues. Those are often labeled "client" or "boss" or both.

Consider that in many situations, you will write far more email and documentation about a thing than you will write code for the thing. Failure to communicate will hinder every career.