What should all computer science students know?

What should all computer science students know?

College is a phase in your career

Your 4-degree is an essential phase in your professional career. During these years you will learn the Computer Science fundamentals that are essentials to working on this amazing field. However, college is not all of your career. You will sooner o later graduate and enter the workforce. Thus, the skills you learn in your degree must evolve as the marketplace changes. That is, the demand of the marketplace. For instance, if you learned Java in your degree, and the area of the marketplace of your interest demands knowledge in other languages such as JavaScript, then start learning JavaScript so you can get that job.

1. Your teacher can’t learn for you. Read the chapter, do practice exercises, and even try to complete your homework/projects BEFORE your lecture and use lectures as a fallback plan for any concepts you couldn’t figure out by studying alone. This is the difference between an A and a B student.
2. Once you get past the intro courses (OOP, Data Structures and Algos, OSes), later courses become much easier.
3. At least once in your life (preferably early in your career) take a random idea you have and implement it, end to end. This will expand your knowledge base, teach you how to resolve problems independently, and - while at work - will allow you to communicate more effectively with other developers/teams since you’ll be able to better empathize with the work required across the full tech stack.
4. Whenever using new languages, read a book on that language or take a free MOOC on it. Whenever using a new framework (ORM framework, MVC framework, deployment framework) run through a “Hello, World!” exercise and read the full documentation. Whether you have a small task on an existing framework used in your codebase or you need to integrate a new framework as part of a feature you’re working on, you’ll thank yourself for taking a moment to really understand the tools you’re using.
5. If you have the opportunity while in school, become a Computer Science TA or tutor. There is nothing which will solidify core concepts in your mind as well as hearing 100 different questions (and deriving 100 answers) about the same concept. Also, this will make you much more successful at software engineering interviews as most interview questions are simply moderately difficult applications of core concepts.

Hope this helps.

-Quora