I am approaching the second half of my college career and will be transferring to the University of Michigan from Washtenaw Community College this fall. Within the past year I asked a question regarding CS degrees on
Ask Metafilter and got some pretty interesting answers.
There seems to be consensus that a CS program, regardless of where it is, should focus on concepts rather than specific languages. Personally I have also wanted to, to put it figuratively, 'get my feet wet,' and work on getting capable of doing moderately intensive work on small scale projects in the realm of computer science. This is due to third party advice I have received in talking with computer science classmates and etc.
In other words, I have a goal of completely avoiding the situation you two laid out and described, and somehow graduating from the UoM hitting the ground running when it comes to preparing resumes and submitting them to X group, organization, etc. I am not at all expecting to be perfect and surely do not intend on inflating what I know or expectations.
Last summer I looked into the
.NET platform, but it seemed somewhat dead end in the sense that (of course) I need a diversified knowledge of languages and etc. when looking at job postings. Perhaps it is a nagging fear that if I were to even anchor myself in a technology for a month, I would end up learning something completely useless once I seriously started to engage recruiters, unless they are looking for people that have drenched themselves in multiple technologies, for which I am OK with any day.
Thus my question: what EXACTLY should a sophomore/junior/inbetween like me be looking into such that when he graduates he can confidently, with integrity to boot, write a resume and go into an interview that says, "I KNOW this, I can do this job, and you can pay me whatever for it, no trips across the ocean necessary."? Links to resources and etc are welcome.
Thanks!
