👋🏻 Everyone,

In this blog, sharing the third-year experiences of college life.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.

So if you think of yourself as the smartest person in the room, then it will be a better option to change the room.

As soon as the third year of college started, there were a lot of questions coming to my mind:

• Should I follow someone who is preparing for other competitive exams (such as GATE, CDAC, etc.)?
• How to prepare myself for off-campus internships?
• Should I leave competitive programming?
• Follow the things that I always love to do, i.e., doing multiple things at a time? Example:
  • 2 hours: Competitive Programming
  • 1 hour: Data Structure & Algorithms
  • Free Time: DevOps, Hacking, Learn Bug Bounty

At last, I decided to go with point 4. The decision may vary from person to person depending on their interests.

We all know that most of the engineering syllabus in private engineering colleges is outdated, but please remember that an in-depth understanding of the basics of major computer science subjects (such as Data Structures, Databases, Computer Networks, Compiler Design) will always set you apart from the majority of students. So do focus on brushing up the basics first before moving to advanced concepts.

For example:
If you know how to use the search function in Python (or any other programming language), but don’t know about the functioning of the search operation, then it will be cumbersome to do system designing at a larger scale.

I always favor learning the skills according to your interests. So most of the time, my funda in life is like this:

Do what you love to do, and not what others want you to do.

{I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but I love this statement. It is the result of my own discretion.}

Do’s:

• Always try to inculcate a habit in your daily routine according to the field of interest or choice, based on your own decisions. Do remember that habit is the combination of skill, knowledge, and desire. So if you lack any of the mentioned traits required for the habit, then reiterate the point of why you have chosen a particular habit.
• Don’t compare yourself with anybody else, but learn from others as much as possible.
• Try to learn the concepts with the help of practical examples to the extent it is feasible.

Don’t:

• You know better than me what to avoid in these four years of engineering. My suggestions, for example: Stop using social media such as Instagram, Tinder, Facebook, Snapchat, Whisper, etc., and spend some of your precious time on LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, Pluralsight, Udemy, Spoj, CodeChef, etc., to build up the connections that may help bring your network as well as your knowledge to a higher level.

Have a nice day!!!

Thanks for spending your precious time reading the post. Do me a favor, if possible: if any of my connections have stories/experiences to share with their fellows, please share them. It helps a lot for other members to avoid mistakes that have already been committed by us.

Thanks & Regards,
B@kul Gupt@