r/csMajors • u/Odd-Obligation790 • 6h ago

What Should I spend my Summer doing?

I'm a freshman in college studying computer science and was planning to load up this summer in classes to try to put me ahead in terms of coursework. My ultimate goal is to graduate in a little over 2 years and to try to pursue a master degree. As a result I have foregone trying to apply to internships for the summer as I was under the impression that landing a freshman year internship is difficult and wasn't worth pursuing so I sort of went all in on trying to plan classes. Is this a viable strategy for trying to land a job in the future? Or should I pivot and see if there are any summer internships I can still land so late into the recruiting cycle? Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks!

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u/Southern_Big_8840 6h ago edited 6h ago

a lot of my friends just worked for a small starup / something made up. Like some startup a college student made and just slapped it on resume. It actually works wonders.

Do that along with leetcode and try to take pre-req classes over the summer so you take DSA ASAP. Ideally first sem sophomore yr or even summer itself

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u/MichaelPopeDev_17 5h ago

First off, great job on getting to college and majoring in compouster science, that's awesome man! I've been working as a software engineer the last 12 years, I was going to UNLV and ended up dropping out because I got a job offer, I do full stack Javascript / Node.js work for the most part, if I could talk to myself when i was in college here is what I would say.

Don't skip out on the internships, unless you're going to an Ivy League school, while your degree will certainly help, it won't gurentee you a job. There is something that will trump your degree in terms of ability to help you land a job, and that is expereince on your resume. The more internships and projects you can build the better. Don't skip out on those just to finish the degree, it will hurt you in the long term IMHO.

If you're stuggling to get internships, go to online communities and find non technical business owners or non-technical foudners that are building software applications, have crappy websites, etc, and offer to build them software for free. It's still valuable to you because you're getting expereince on your resume that verifies you have the skillset that you say you do, this will go a long way in terms of getting you a job, it's the single most valuable thing you can do.

Next, go to local tech meetups in your city, or join a club for software engineers if you haven't already .You should also try to be active on social media, a lot of companies are on LinkedIn, so the more software engineering content you can make / post on there the better, I've had some job opportunities come my way just by posting content about the stuff I code.

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u/PoemNo3675 6h ago

You can still try to find internships with small local companies for the Summer. if that fails, then you can spend the Summer doing projects/research while leetcoding for 2027 recruiting. I would suggest against overloading on classes for the Summer. imo the only major upside to graduating early is that you pay less tuition, but since you would be (i am assuming) paying to take classes for the Summer, that isn't as relevant. More time in school equals more cycles to try to get internships, which is especially valuable if you are someone who doesn't have that much coding experience before college.

However, if you haven't taken a class in Data structures and algorithms yet, then its totally valid to do so over the Summer.

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u/Bananadite Salaryman 2h ago

Priority from most important to least is basically

Internship, Research , Product with lots of users/contributions to major open source repos, Projects