First-Year University Checklist
Tips to kick-start your university journey as a Computer Science student
Introduction
Hi, I am Yong Ming, currently a second-year software engineering student at the University of Malaya. In this article, I will share what I have done as a zero basic programmer in my first year of university life and what I wished I realized as soon as possible as a CS student.
Table of contents
1. Assignments
2. Personal Project
3. Be a Leader
4. LinkedIn
5. GitHub & Git Version Control
6. Co-curriculum
Assignments
When talking about assignments, I believe most of us are afraid of the tight deadlines, endless burning of the midnight oil, and pairing up with inactive team members. It is sad to see that there are students who do not take advantage of the assignments to improve their skillset. In my first semester of university, I was very active in participating in co-curricular activities or university projects. While these consume a lot of my time, I did not spend much time contributing to group programming assignments like Fundamental of Programming. I only realized the importance in my second-semester Data Structure course assignment where I first exposed myself to web programming. I would say that the assignments allow me to learn so much new skillset that I did not learn in lectures or tutorials. So please contribute and commit to your assignments.
Personal Project
I would encourage every CS student to build their own personal project that could apply their CS skill set and solve real-life problems. It does not have to be a huge system or fancy application. My personal project comes in handy when I introduce it to my internship interviewer, it really helps me to get a higher chance of getting an internship placement. Besides, I recommend everyone sharing their personal project on social media, including LinkedIn as it can be useful to others. I hesitated to share it on my social media at first, but by stepping out of my comfort zone to do it, I got a lot of positive feedback that gave me confidence. Just remember your first post would not be perfect. You can check out my personal project post here. https://yongming.medium.com/building-my-first-personal-project-fdecd5d2a474
Be a Leader
During your university life, there are a lot of opportunities to pick up a role as a leader either in co-curricular projects or academic assignments. Just stepping out of your comfort zone if you are new to leadership, you can start being an assignment group leader. Although you might put more effort into managing the project progress compared to your teammates, you can learn a lot of soft skills as a team leader. Nobody stops you from trying.
You should sign up for a LinkedIn account and manage your profile well. LinkedIn can provide you with job invitations if the job hunter or recruiter finds your profile suitable for their job openings. In my case, I have received about 4 internship interview invitations. I would recommend you to put a proper profile picture and set up your profile description professionally. There are a lot of tutorials on youtube and articles to set up a LinkedIn profile, here are some that I find useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kwqqtpprrE
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-tips-students-new-grads-linkedin-omar-garriott/
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
https://my.linkedin.com/in/yong-ming-ng-8478a1193
GitHub & Git Version Control
If you have any projects to showcase, GitHub is definitely a good place where you can share your codes. In my resume, I attach my GitHub link to allow the recruiter to check out my previous works. GitHub is famous and very useful as a collaboration tool. The version control functionalities of Git allow programmers to collaborate easily. Learning the concept of Git is important as a CS student, my web programming course assignment team utilized the version control of Git and collaborate easily during this pandemic. Here is one of the links that you can check out to know more about Git.
https://git-scm.com/doc
Co-curriculum
It cannot be denied that participating in co-curricular projects is important too. You can connect with more interesting people and some events will be memorable ones in your life. I am a person who enjoys teamwork very much. In my first year, I joined a few competitions in volleyball, theatre, choir, and so forth. Luckily I got first place in the volleyball competition held by my faculty and inter-residential college theatre competition. Joining an event as a committee can be very fun too. However, it is important to manage well your academics at the same time. Joining clubs or events is optional, so please think twice about whether you have the time to join without aborting your academics. For UM students, you can find some of the clubs and societies at https://www.myumsu.com/clubs-and-societies.html.
Conclusion
This is just a sharing based on my experience. Do not hesitate yourself if you find it hard, I think it takes time to improve especially programming skills. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave a comment as it might be beneficial to others.
