Okay so… I just entered my final year and ngl I’m lowkey panicking. I wasted my last 3 years doing basically nothing. I don’t know programming properly, never built a single real-world project, and now placements are around the corner.
Like fr, is there still any chance for me to pick up a skill, actually build stuff, and somehow get job-ready before it’s too late? Or should I just accept my fate lol.
Also random question (pls don’t roast me): is there even a platform where you can:
- buy projects (so I can at least see how things work)
- get mentorship/teaching from people who know their stuff
- and later maybe even sell my own projects when I get better
Basically like a one-stop place to learn + build + get guidance. Does that even exist or am I just daydreaming here?
Any advice would be a lifesaver 🙏—
Stop wasting your time would be my first advice.
If you really feel like you’ve wasted your time for the first 3 years, change. Change now. Not tomorrow, not next year, not after you manage to find the real ‘good place that will help you learn something’. Do it now, where you are. Start learning, ask questions, discuss with teachers (and fellow students, too), invest yourself.
It’s never too late, no matter how late. But there is no shortcut to doing the work.
Like already mentioned, that’s the place you’re in right now. But, allow me to insist on that, it requires you to put in the work. Like with learning anything new.
The other suggestion I wanted to make was already given to you: since you seem to be into coding, start actually coding stuff. A diploma is not worth much compared to experience you acquire by making stuff and writing you own code for real.
There are plenty open source projects looking for someone to help push them forward if you have no idea on what to work. But if that’s the case I would also suggest you question your motivation to study that.
CS grads are in the worst position ever. University is often mistaken for vocational education, however that would be a technical college.
I have spent a lot of time crossing between a practical education environment, aimed at production skills, and university, aimed at thinking ability and abstract skills.
Honestly, my experience is that students are much more capable in a production environment after a two week boot camp than after three years of university on a roughly parallel topic. However, the non-idiots in the academic case will be able to understand arguments about the context of what they are doing better.
The point is that a philosophy degree might be more employable than a CS degree in some situations. The dude who cofounded Flickr and Slack was working off of an english degree. Use your degree for understanding and some projects for knowledge.
I also have a humanities degree and work in IT, with a wide range of applied skills I learned from necessity instead of a prof.
So create the necessity for skills by making useful shit, or even just fixing things. Find friends and make a silly app. Volunteer at a nonprofit and improve their CRM database. Build a homelab that you share with roommates. Find the local permacomputing group and help them turn all those shitty win10 obsolete machines into sleek linux machines. Ignore money and employment as task criteria for a few years, or freelance IT gigs.
Solve real world problems for real experience.