🌟 First Guest Lecture at Purdue University! 🌟
Today, I had the honor of giving my first guest lecture for ECE 461: Software Engineering at my alma mater, Purdue. A special thanks to Professor James (Jamie) Davis for this incredible opportunity!
The topic of my lecture was "What College Won’t Teach You About the Software Engineering Industry", where I covered some industry insights that often aren’t emphasized in college:
💡 Leetcode doesn’t make you a software engineer – it prepares you for interviews, but real-world engineering is so much more. I don't know who needs to hear this but I wish someone had stressed this more for me when I was in school. I used to think that being good at competitive coding meant that I will breeze through my job. This couldn't be further from the truth.
💡 Learn to read other people’s code – in university, you are often times working individually or with a small team where you know everything about the code you are working with. In real life, you might have to work on a codebase with millions of lines of code, no documentation and the person who wrote the code probably resigned years ago.
💡 Learn how to debug – this is one of the most valuable skills you’ll use daily. Whether its using a debugger in your IDE or using log statements in observability tools. Learn how to get to the root cause of problems.
💡 Contribute to open source – it helps you learn and write high-quality code. You will likely work on a very well maintained codebase with some of the best developers.
💡 Be kind, be humble – In a cutthroat industry such as tech, a little bit of kindness goes a long way. This will help you way more than you think.
I truly hope the students found value in the presentation, and I’m grateful for the chance to contribute. It was an amazing experience, and I look forward to more opportunities like this in the future!
And please, use the comments section to add more points which you believe aren't stressed enough in college.
#technology #computerscience #engineering #software
