What are 3 – 5 things you wish you knew as an underclassman CSC or IT student?
• Career: I wish I knew earlier on how close both programs can be at times. Because it took me a long time to realize perusing IT is better suited for my interests than CSC, but I did not want to close myself off from potential jobs in my original field. It took talking to my professors to realize perusing the degree whose classes were a better fit for me is only a starting point. As, I can easily acquire more skills overtime if I wish to transition back towards jobs more oriented around CSC.
• Transfer Difficulty: As a transfer student, some classes transitioned into better than others, and its important now to know to go out and talk with the professors teaching them beforehand. I wish I had tried to reach out sooner and find my shortcomings before they became a bigger issue. Thankfully, I was able to reach out to the graduates and work through them, but it took a lot more time and patience than if I had gone earlier.
• Networking: COVID made it extremely difficult to learn a lot of these skills early on, and It made a lot of lessons on those skills seem to have less value at the time. Exposed in my internship, I realize now they are incredibly value not only for the potential connections for job opportunities, but it forms a network of knowledgeable people to converse with and help someone develop. It might not last much longer after school, but networking enough could end with me meeting a lot of former acquaintances out in the work force. Especially in areas, such as Cyber Security, where the number of professionals is very low for the demand.
• Project Management: I assumed early on my time managements skills were decent, but those skills were never developed with certain projects in mind. Where most of the work is doing research for hours that can and sometimes resulted in no actual progress. It drove me insane until I learned how to better schedule and organize things in the planning stage. It also taught me the value of failing since it is bound to happen. Its important to learn during these times on a project and what can be done to improve the situation. Because a lot of CSC/IT coding projects are not going to be expected to be pretty, but it is important to make it work.
• Grades: Early on, I became very worried towards what my GPA will do to my projections for my career. It made me hesitate to take certain classes and cause unnecessary stress in many of them. At the end of the day, the grade is not the important part of the classes. It’s the lessons learned throughout the course to take forward with me. Getting an A is nice, but you should not burn out trying to get it. A business will normally care more about what is taken away from this project than the project itself. So, its not bad to get an occasional B or C just keep pushing forward.
-Connor Ruch
0 Comments