What did you do this past week?
This past week I was alternating between interviews and preparing for the OOP exam. I went through all of the class notes, did the hackerranks several times, and felt prepared for most of the exam. I also completed a project for Big Data programming in which we used the hadoop framework to produce reduce-side joins.
What’s in your way?
Nothing is in my way. With the first Exam behind us, I feel I can pace myself with classwork, studying, and scheduling job hunt activities with enough time to get a drink every once in a while. I’m working at this pretty hard because I won’t get another chance like this. Once I have a first full-time job, the path my career takes from there is more predicated on factors not related to what classes I’m taking at school or what my GPA is.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will try to evenly space readings/preparation for OOP, Big Data and interview prep. I also have some coding challenges from big companies that I’m actually going to do.. so that will be fun.
What was your experience of Test #1 (the problems, the time, HackerRank)?
Compared to the previous format from SWE in Summer 2017, which was comprised of Canvas multiple choice and Hackerrank, I like this new format much better. The amount of time seemed fine, but an additional 30 minutes or so might have been useful. I got hung up on a specific problem and actually had started down a path that would have worked but abandoned it after it didn’t work right away. In the end I think my grade was fair, but would have liked to have had more practice at that particular topic before the test. A practice hackerrank on similar material would have been very useful.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I found a few articles on salary negotiation that I plan to use in the upcoming weeks. I’ve skimmed a few but plan on reading them thoroughly very soon. It is vitally important to learn and master these skills.
https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/