After I received my acceptance letter from Oregon State, I had about two months to prepare before I started taking classes. I researched everything I could about the post-baccalaureate program and scoured the internet for advice from current and past students. I focused on developing a strategy for success — after all, I was given an incredible opportunity to “go back to college” and I wanted to make sure I took advantage of every opportunity available to me in the pursuit of realizing my dreams.
First, I had to define, what is my dream? What do I actually want to do? Well, I knew I wanted to be a software engineer, but where? Doing what? I didn’t really know. At this point, I had been out of the workforce for four years and more importantly, had been living abroad for the same amount of time. I didn’t really know what the “hot” companies were because I had been out of the tech scene for so long. Since I didn’t really have a starting point, I went on Discord and Reddit and read about the companies that other CS students were really excited about. Big Tech. Unicorns. FAANG, or FAANGMULA+. I became familiar with a certain “tier” ranking system that many CS students subscribe to and in the absence of data, used it to guide my research (I will probably comment on this in a later post).
As I was becoming reacquainted with the tech scene again, I also started to hear just how difficult it was in getting a job at one of these companies. The figurative and literal hoops candidates have to jump through in order to validate their programming skills and job preparedness. Due to this, I learned that many people recommend an internship as the surest path to a full-time software engineering position at a company in order to bypass much of the difficulty of these interviews. An internship is still difficult to get, but the idea was that it was less difficult than the process of applying directly to a full-time position (there are so many factors that go into this though, and internships and intern conversion will likely be the topic of another post.). As a result, even before I started the post-bacc program, I knew my goal was getting an internship at a company where I wanted to work at after I graduated.
Now that my goals and dreams were aligned, I came to the fun part — how can Oregon State help me? Since this wasn’t my first rodeo, I knew I needed to pay extra attention to two things: my course plan and my extracurriculars. As a full-time student, I could dedicate a lot of time to classes and that meant I could graduate within 1.5 years. I pored over the course catalog to construct a schedule. The first two quarters were easy — every student has certain pre-requisite classes they need to take before the rest of the curriculum unlocks for them. Once that happens though, students are given a lot of freedom on what their school experience will be. I thought deeply about what I would choose as my electives based on what I had learned would be competitive in the job market and organized my schedule in a way that the difficulty was averaged out between different quarters. This was particularly key because even if I got an internship, I still wanted to take classes during that quarter. I took that under consideration when figuring out at which time I was going to take certain classes. (As a result, I am taking CS 344 in the Fall, not in Summer, and at the same time as CS 467, which I had to receive special permission for.)
Lastly, I wanted to leverage my status as an undergraduate student and participate in university hackathons at Oregon State and beyond. All of my research showed me that recruiters love students who do hackathons, hackathons give opportunities to build portfolio projects, and hackathons also give opportunities to connect with industry mentors. For this reason, within the first month of starting classes, I joined the Oregon State Hackathon Club.
For my next post, I will go into hackathons, what I’ve built, and how I talk about it during interviews.
