Also, I'm really bad with the friend thing. In high school, the way I'm "making friends" is by getting to lunch first and sitting at an empty table, and hoping that decent people sit with me. I guess I'll have to work on that.
Yep, you're a CS major alright. I think a lot more people in programming fields were like that than you realize. You'll fit right in at a CS department, where the playing field is leveled by nearly everyone starting out socially awkward. Also remember, no one you meet when you enter college will know you. Thus giving you one of life's few opportunities to entirely change how people perceive you. If you make it an explicit goal to be more outgoing, even just in the first few weeks, people will see you as such and treat you as such.
The other thing which is really important is university employment services. RIT is one of the best in those regards, as many majors here have several mandatory paid internships as a requirement to graduate, and so helping students find employment is as important as providing good academic quality. Let's be honest here; a decent self-learner could teach themselves programming to an acceptable level. What they can't do, which a good university will do for them, is have a network of connections and relationships with employers seeking employees. This year, my second year at RIT, I picked out several professors in our department who I deemed to have the most contacts in industry and made it a goal to impress them. I got an interview from one's contacts, and am currently on a pretty well paying internship for the contacts of another. The people who gave me the internship held the professor in such high regard that the interview process essentially consisted of: "Here's a tour of our facility; we will pay you $15 an hour, when can you start?" I'm pretty sure they didn't even have my resume.
And even aside from that, depending on the program's merits, big companies will take notice and will send recruiters looking for interns and employees. Hardly a month goes by at RIT without some form of Microsoft sponsored talk or event, at most of which they collect resumes. From what I recall, RIT's Game Design & Development major (the one I'm in) has 98% employment after graduation; and that's really one of, if not the most important number setting a good university program apart from a bad one or a self-learning situation. It lets you skip the whole 'climbing the corporate ladder from the mailroom' bullshit.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9794444 times)