How to study computer science in college?

Hello Rafael,

This is a great question. I am currently a software engineer (Financial Apps developer specifically) and I was formally a Computer Science tutor, mentor, advising intern, lab instructor, and club president. Let me give you the same advice I gave all my students.

1. Make connections. The students that have the highest rate of success both in school and after graduating are those who have strong connections in the major. Make sure you align yourself with those that can have fun but are also hard-working, intelligent people. You acquire the traits of the people you hang out with the most.
2. Learn the basics of programming. For example, what is a programming language? How do languages work? How does that language deal with "Hello, world"? How do I interact with this language? What kind of data structures does it use? How do I use these data structures?
3. Learn how to solve problems. In computer science, that is algorithms. Algorithms are language-agnostic (meaning it doesn't matter what language you are learning first). You can even learn algorithms/problem-solving before you even learn how to program.

Hi Rafael!

Congrats on getting started on your college career! I graduated with a computer science degree two years ago, and I remember feeling completely lost in the beginning as to how I can make the most out of my major in college.

If you've never programmed before, start with just hammering in the basics. You should understand the differences between data structures, how loops works, and how to use conditional logic. From there, I would start working through some example projects. You can probably find some online, or work through a textbook.

When you feel pretty comfortable with the tutorials, start working on your own projects. The more useful they are in your life, the better. Try to think of small things in your daily life that could be optimized automatically. For example, do you wake up every morning, check the weather, check your commute time to work or school, then get ready? Why not try out some APIs to automatically pull weather data and travel time every morning at your usual wakeup time? Do you love video games, but hate having to pull up a website to tell you how to craft a tool, or stats on a character, or cost of an object? Mod it into the game, or build your own search feature to make finding that information easier. Even if you fail your initial goal, you'll learn a ton more than you would just reading about it.

When you've gotten comfortable doing projects on your own, you'll be in a really good place to start applying for internships. Having these personal projects on your resume is a huge benefit to you, as it shows you are able to learn and work independently.

Finally, try to find peers who are also passionate about programming and connect with them. Create study groups, and if you share any interests, try to think of some projects you can work on together relevant to those interests. This will give you experience working with teams, and being able to talk about those experiences is good for future interviews.

Best of luck!

Congratulations on choosing to study Computer Science! It is challenging and exciting at the same time, Developing passion for programming and coding is a great base to start off with. Taking up small coding challenges from time to time and enthusiastic to solve them is a great way to learn and master. Networking within your class mates, professors and outside coding or meet ups is great too. Picking up small projects and working within a team in developing something that is creative and helpful to companies is cool. You can showcase your projects on youtube and Github. Partnering with your batchmate in doing group studies and project work is good. Keeping up on your activities on what you learnt daily and weekly will help look back on the progress and help to improve. I hope this suffices your question and is helpful in stepping on an exciting study program. I am happy to answer to any other questions you may have that would help in your study. Best wishes:-)

The best way to learn anything is through reading books. There are many books for Computer Science Major read those . Do the revision of the topics taught in college on the same day and make notes . As Computer Science includes Coding also , so do practice it over the weekend or whenever you get free time. Website like HACKEREARTH and HACKERRANK provide space to practice coding online. I had followed the same routine for computer science in college.