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[Parsely]

I'm going to have a certificate of completion for my CIS degree in a couple months since I did the vocational courses first, and by the end of the year I'll have my Associate's degree, going on a Bachelor's a few years down the road.

So at these three various stages of education, what the hell do I actually do with this stuff? What kind of technical work can I get with this? How can I leverage this to the utmost advantage?

One hears all kinds of crap about how your degree is useless, and the idea of these years of hard work and expense not mattering triggers a primal fear inside me. I research this frequently when I get stressed to keep myself from putting the barrel of a gun in my mouth (I'm not actually suicidal), but I still need some reassurance from people I know that I'm doing the right thing.

[Sergarr]

By itself, the completion of a bachelor's degree doesn't mean much. It's not at all like getting a doctor's degree, where you have to defend yourself from three fierce opponents that will tear your argument both rhetorically and physically if you make even a slightest slip.

The usual benefit of having bachelor (or masters) education, as I see it, is having access to a lot of various circles while you're in it, hence acquiring many useful contacts in many interesting institutions. Also learning how to deal with all of this nepotism bullshit without it being a life-or-death issue from the start.

If you can name at least five different interesting and/or potentially useful people in your future scientific career that have mutually good relationships with you and are able to be reliably contacted within a week, you are certainly doing the right thing.

[Truean]

I assume you mean basically a computer science type degree? If so:

A.) Learn programing languages. C, C+, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Object Oriented Programming, SQL, Weaver, and whatever else you can to look good on a resume. Look up local job listings in your area and job field to learn requirements for jobs advertised and learn them.

B.) Learn network systems and programs including Sracle, Hyperion, and others.

C.) Of course, understand Microsoft Office, including advanced Excel functions (SQL), and database management. Some analyst jobs can be good.

D.) Basically look for things in job descriptions and try to meet those.

Additionally, you'll want to join some type of computer clubs to network a bit, if possible, as you complete your B.S. in computer science eventually.

Was that any help? I hope so.

[Parsely]

-snip-

I already dongle around a lot with OOP. I really like SQL and PHP (believe it or not it's because I learned HTML from Bay12 so using PHP is like being at home), Java makes me want to vomit, I've tried C and C++ and it left no impression. I'm actually super into MySQL because of how dead simple it is.

You did help restore my confidence some. I read Life Advice a lot and you post in there some, so I generally trust your advice, having experienced it over the years. What do you mean by computer clubs?

[Trapezohedron]

In general, it is in your best interest to befriend powerful peers (students) and professors. The recommendation letters of professors can land you on a very powerful position for a "fresh grad", which might not amount to a lot immediately, but provided that when you already have an opportunity like that at a young age, you've already made a lot of progress ahead of time.

Depending on cultures, befriending a student may also yield you an opportunity same as above.

I'd say for degrees that are non-specialized, and even then, those specialized degrees have to be in demand, your real advantage is to build up as wide a network as possible to help you find jobs easier.

[Flying Dice]

Here's some sprinklings of stuff:

Bachelors: In most places this is equivalent to what a high school diploma used to be. Required to get in the door for basically anything that isn't entry-level menial bullshit or the sort of thing you'd go to trade school for. More importantly, it's a way to make connections in academia to further yourself when you got for a Masters and maybe a doctorate.

Masters: The biggest jump in potential earnings between levels of education comes from the Bachelors to Masters step. Going past this for a doctorate will just give you more debt while only opening up long-term investment in a professorship as new job options (which is, itself, heavily demanding and often not very rewarding), unless you're getting a vocational doctorate, in which case you're going to have literal mountains of debt but also a license to print money.

Doctorate: See above. Vocational = tons of debt, very high pay potential; all else = you are now either a professor or horribly overqualified for your field of work.

If you intend to go beyond the Bachelors, make sure to make contacts. Find professors that like you, make sure they remember you, especially if you're going into their field/attending the same university for your Masters.

--

For CIS in particular I don't have any special advice beyond what Truean said: learn the commonly used programs, languages, systems, &c. in the field and/or specialization you're aiming for. In a field like this that tends to feed more into the workforce than doctoral programs, definitely continue to make contacts. Your professors in a Masters program are typically going to be well-regarded members of the profession, and many such professions are small enough that personal reputation can easily carry you from the classroom to the office, and later from job to job. 80% of getting hired is who you know, who will vouch for you, and experiences/friendships that relate you to the hiring staff.

That's what everyone says for good reason: networking networking networking. Also learn good habits for interviews, post-interview contact, personal and distance communication, and body language. It doesn't matter how good you are if the people you need to impress don't know you from Adam and get bad vibes from talking to you, exchanging emails, or just seeing how you position yourself when you sit down.

[i2amroy]

It also cuts off some jobs as you become 'overqualified' (see: We think you'll bugger off to a better job first opportunity), but the ones that open up are better in general usually.

For what it's worth a side effect of the whole "college degree required to even look at you" type of certificate inflation combined with the fact that the labor market didn't exactly rebound as hard as many people thought it was going to have meant that employers are much less likely to reject you for being "overqualified" now than they were in the past. It still happens occasionally and in extreme cases, but a lot of companies have been taking advantage of the worse market to get lots of experience/education for what is, from their point of view, a cheaper price. (Course that's kinda bad for us, ideally we would have enough positions at the levels of education we actually have and get paid the amount that we deserve, but hey, you still gotta eat ).

That said yeah, network network network. Getting a job is, as mentioned before, mainly based on who you know, and only then based on what your skills are. Obviously you need to have some qualifications (though how much you actually need depends heavily on the field/etc.), but get to know your professors; they're the ones who will be writing you reference letters that will help you land the good positions later.

CIS in particular, while not quite as high-end aimed as a more theoretically-focused pure CS degree, still has a very large amount of things that can be done with it, ranging from being the "tech guy" at a smaller company to working as part of a large team in one of the big software names. You don't necessarily need to pick now, but I'd suggest by the time that you near the end of your Bachelor's degree that you try to narrow down a bit what exact fields you particularly enjoy (or hate less), and possibly use that to determine if you want to go for a job right then or shoot for higher education. Some fields (like AI development, for example) tend to require higher levels of education for a lot of their "entry-level" stuff, while in other fields (web development) you can pretty much jump straight in with just a bachelors and be just fine (and salaries are exceptionally good right now in a lot of places).

My last piece of advice is to code up some stuff on somewhere publicly accessible like Github and use it as a sort of "portfolio". Employers will look at that stuff, and it's not totally unheard of for some of the more employer-focused job searching stuff to actually contact people based on their personal projects. It's always good to have some work showing that you do know how to code, or even better that you know how to work as part of a larger open-source team.