Ask HN: What should my pre-college summer gameplan be?

3 points by dynamic99 9 years ago | 0 comments

Hey all,

I'm an incoming college freshman planning to major in Computer Science. I've always been very interested in programming, and throughout HS I managed to teach myself some basic scripting in Python and Perl.

However, I was looking at my university's CS community, and it's really awesome -- but also VERY intimidating. A lot of the students there were doing hackathons and building small apps before they even got to college. Now they have side businesses in web design and development, and have very solid portfolios. I feel like I'm not going to be able to compete.

I want to be at that level. I have 2-3 months before classes start. I want to focus on web development (full stack, with less of a priority on design). I keep dabbling here and there but I cannot maintain focus and get past a beginner level, because I keep thinking I'm focusing on the wrong things.

What should my gameplan be this summer? Assuming I want to focus on getting involved with the startup/hackathon community with the MEAN stack, what would my self-learning "syllabus" look like? What should I expect to be able to accomplish by the end of the summer if I put 3-4 hours a day into this?

I'd appreciate any help you all can give me. Thank you!

akeck 9 years ago |

Two things:

Tech: Focus on fully completing a concrete web project that touches the full stack. This means it can't be too big/complicated. The idea is to learn what it means to finish something serious under deadline (first day on campus). Finishing serious things under deadline starts in college, and continues for the rest of your career.

Life (from personal experience): Read up hard on personal finance and personal investment (Bogle, MMM, etc.), including predatory credit cards, emergency funds, dangers of "life-style loans", etc. The first days on campus usually include walking by tables for finance vendors that can hurt your long term financial health. Knowledge is power.

Also, if I had dropped my 1K from the summer grocery store job in a market index fund my freshman year, certain later life decisions would have been a lot smoother. Play the long game.