Notes for self:

  • The people in the panel have experience or are currently enrolled in Computer Science or Computer Science adjacent programs in college or have participated in Computer Science related jobs
  • You have to consider if applying to a college via Computer Science is a lottery or not
  • Cognitive Science is a pretty diverse and spread out major if your trying to not do pure Computer Science
  • Any EC that is related to Computer Science is pretty good and shows your understanding and application of Computer Science is good such as teaching at CodeNinjas
  • You have time to build your time own project at CSA and CSP and have done so much and put in much time and effort and shows to the people who are hiring you to show your skills
  • Use things like LeetCode to challenge yourself and is something you need to know but it is difficult
  • Have a personal website and link your projects and you could even reference that as a project

Takeaways:

  • You don’t have to directly apply to Computer Science and Computer Science can even be explored in a variety of different fields
  • Don’t be fixed down on what major you want and explore what you want such as Data Science and Cognitive Science
  • Doesn’t matter what school you get into and what level of education you get out of college
  • Showing your understanding of Computer Science and application is what colleges care about mainly
  • Show your passion for Computer Science to people hiring you and your applying for
  • Make a bunch of projects that have various values and meanings make sure to share those when your getting hired and applying for college
  • Have some tangibles as they serve as a physical representation of what you can do and as well as serve as memories and what you did
  • If you want to really go to a company, maybe look at something that they did or something related to that company and focus mainly on what they look at, design something they have
  • Build things that you enjoy and things that you enjoy - follow the path with least resistance, use your passion to build things you want and as a way to motivate further learning
  • Do something simple and fun and take your time enjoying Computer Science
  • Having enough experience and skills to actually describe yourself and work is important
  • Having a computer science background just gives a good head start into the
  • Content doesn’t matter, but the coding does
  • Doing CSS and doing various things that other people can’t do is what makes you stand out
  • Picking up various tools small and big gives you a huge advantage
  • Don’t skip the fundamentals but still explore the numerous tools

    Reflection:

    The panel was very interesting, we had a various amount of students from different experiences and I learned a bunch of interesting tricks, tips and even some strategies that can be implemented in our journey not just in college but even outside it. Some things that really stood out to me and made me reflect in my past years’ CS experience was what Tristan said about how you should enjoy coding and following the path with the least resistance and how you should do what you want in order to better appreciate and understand CS. This made me realize that the projects that I made although were good and often times represented what I wanted to do, I never realized the impact that it had on me and looking back, coding something that you like and enjoy is really rewarding is probably what motivated me to pursue CSA and maybe even in the future may be the reason I pursue computer engineering