To me, the most important section of our guide is the “Things I Wish I Knew as a Freshman” section. This highlights the main points from our guide that we each felt would be the most beneficial to a Notre Dame Computer Science or Engineering freshman reading our guide. This is probably cheating a little bit for this question, so I’ll look at some of the other sections of our guide I feel would be very helpful to an incoming student. One key section is the “When to Start Preparing” section. This has some advice that I could have certainly used, as I probably started preparing for my career a little to late. The “How to Prepare” section would also be very useful. I took a “learning as you go” approach to preparing for my interviews. I didn’t really know how to prepare for my first couple of interviews, but learned through the experience of these early interviews. This meant that I knew what I was doing by the time of my later interviews, but probably could have performed better on the early interviews if I knew how to prepare better. This section had some great tips, such as researching the company and position beforehand so you can answer certain questions better. It also had some great resources for preparing for technical interviews. Probably the best advice I got for this is to utilize the mock interviews that the Career Center runs. I didn’t know these existed (probably because I ignore too many emails). These would have been great to work out the kinks of interviewing and learn how to best prepare.
I think the University’s Computer Science and Engineering department prepares students well for the workforce. I think it is tough for a department to completely prepare students. Since Notre Dame isn’t a technical school, it really isn’t fair to spend an excessive amount of time preparing students for a certain type of job. Students will have too varied of a future career path to do this. As a place of learning, I think the University should not focus too heavily on preparing us for work. It should be a goal, but scholarly pursuits should be the main focus.
While not a main goal, preparing students for the workforce has to at least be a goal. It would be a disservice for students to be left completely in the dark for what will be required of them in the “real world.” I think the department does a good job with this. Professors will often stress skills that will be the most important in the workforce. There was one complaint I had for the department that they have actually fixed for later graduating classes. I often felt that the order of our classes didn’t really fit well with the skills that we needed for technical interviews. The main problem is that we take our “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” class our senior year, while many people are taking technical interviews. The issue is that this is one of the main classes that are tested in these interviews and we have not completed it by that point. However, future graduating classes will be taking this class earlier. I believe this shows that the University does care about preparing students for interviews and the workforce.
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