What to do to get my next job in CS?

Career Advice
1

Hey guys! Looking for some advice on what to do next.

Quick background: I am a University student graduating from a decent University with High Honors(Honors College/Magna Cum Laude) this year in May. I am a finance major/computer science minor. However, I have basically no job or club experience.

Goals: I want to have a job in California, preferably LA.

I recently finished the front end development section of FreeCodeCamp, and am wondering what I should do next. Should I learn React and Sass through online courses and then finish FreeCodeCamp or have y’all had more success with other routes? (If so, any React/Sass course recommendations?)
What would be good resume builders basically?

I know I got a late start here, but I am willing to put in a lot of hours, and want to be future focused. Don’t want to be stuck without a job. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

2

What you focus your studies on depends on what type of work you want to do. I just want to chirp in and remind you that as a senior, you want to be actively job hunting and interviewing now. It’s often a months-long process and companies that are recruiting new college hires are already interviewing and making offers.

3

I don’t think my resume is impressive enough to be considered a legitimate candidate yet, so I’m trying to work every day to build it before I start applying? I don’t mind taking a side job to pay for myself while I work this out. Do you think my resume is already enough to start applying? Just looking for the most efficient route.

4

Can I ask why you’re seemingly trying to position yourself for front end dev if you’ve on course for a very decent degree in finance/CS? You are set up degree-wise to go into something finance related, and that’s going to pay ten times (and going forward, hundreds of times) what you can possibly make doing FE Dev.

5

Yeah. Fair Question! I don’t necessarily need to go into front end dev, but I want to go into something computer science related for two reasons:

  1. The more I work in Finance, the more I realize how sketchy/unpredictable it is.
  2. I think computer science can set me on a path, so I can build really cool applications that would have a more positive impact.
6

Fair enough, bear in mind that the front-end is a tiny (useful, but tiny) part of most stuff though; shit, web stuff is a tiny part of what’s out there. Your degree should be enough to get you something really interesting where you can actually make a difference, careful about chasing cool stuff

7

Hey @brettzg,
first of all, way to go with graduating with honors. :+1:
Second, if you want to pursue a job as a developer, you have to understand that a developer is a pretty general term. You are casting a very wide net and you need to ask yourself what type of coding job would interest you.
It can be a Backend developer, mobile developer, low-level and so on and so forth.
Once you figure out which field interests you, you can then go ahead and take the necessary steps to achieve that dream.

For most fresh graduates, places that will interview you are not going to be looking for professional experience (since you have none), but are going to want to see projects you have made and what your train of thought is.

Start by having active Github and CodePen accounts which will showcase your work.

This might be a side note, but it may be of assistance. I wrote an article about going through the motions of getting a developer job. Feel free to give it a read.

8

Hey, if you are clueless about databases and servers the udemy course on the web developer bootcamp by Colt is a good start, if you feel confident enough the advanced web developer bootcamp goes into full integration with react, as well as data visualizations (d3, google charts style). I’d recommend the latter buy I’m biased on udemy courses :stuck_out_tongue:

I think it could help you learning a bit about the backend if you want a job, integration is hard if you have no idea what you’re doing.

9

You could combine your majors somewhat by going into something like data science, business analytics/intelligence, or machine learning, which are arguably way more interesting (and higher-paying) than front-end Web development. I see tons of jobs in data science and machine learning especially all the time—if you learn either of those well, that would essentially set you up for life with what most would call a more lucrative career.

My suggestion would be to forget about front-end and get into Python for machine learning. There are so many jobs in that field right now. And when you’re still a student, not too many companies will care that you don’t have experience—just look for internships so you can get that on the job.

1 Like