The Short Answer:
Gain enough experience & confidence by graduation to be hired as a mid-level engineer. It might not sound feasible but trust me, it is. Many people have done it, I have done it, and in the following lines, I will tell you how to do it.
Find Your Area of Interest and select a Career Path
As a freshman in college, one of the first challenges any IT student would face is deciding which career path to take. We can classify available career fields into 3 pathways: Dev, Networking, and IT where Dev is the pathway to software development, Networking is the pathway to routing and switching, and IT is the pathway to infrastructure, aka cyber, systems, & management.
Some advisors tend to say that it is okay to not be sure of your direction until your senior year. I’m not sure how they came up with this, but for us (wanna be 6fig paid straight out for college), this is the most important piece of the puzzle. You should have figured out your area of interest and how to pursue it by the time you’re completed with most GenEd Classes. In other words, around your second or third semester, you must have chosen a pathway and know what skills/technologies are highly in demand for that area. The goal is to focus your studies on the more in demand skills in your industry. For instance, as I’m writing this, somebody wanting a 6figures package straight out of college in IT, would want to be proficient at scripting with python, and shell or bash, a deep exposure to Linux or Windows Administration, a decent networking protocols, a basic understanding of Security, and the confidence that they can deliver a 6fig worth service to any employer.
Tips on figuring out a career path:
- Research what area is growing the fastest in your chosen pathway (Demand and Supply never lie). In 2022, it is fair to say in IT, cloud computing is the hottest thing, and the next thing seems to be AI’s in Dev
- Read through job posts on indeed, and ask yourself if you could do this everyday for the rest of your life (Love wins lol). And look into requirements as well
- Join the subreddit (r/ITCareerQuestions) and read through posts, and ask questions if needed
- Attend Career Fairs
- Write down as much as possible and go back to review and figure what you want for real
Once you have an idea of your pathway, you want to go back to indeed and find a couple high paying job in that area. Then write down skills that are a common requirement to all of them…. FYI This piece of paper is worth 100k, and I will show how to turn it into liquid cash in the next section
Build yourself to be A Well-Rounded Engineer
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good
– Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”
The piece of paper from section 1 is all skills you need to build in order to become the most sought professional in your field. Now that you have that information, you want to start by looking at your school curriculum, research and only take classes that will teach you these skills. The strategy to gain the upper hand faster and become the best is to take fundamentals and advanced-level courses for each topics. For instance, your curriculum might only require a programming class, but if you are thinking about becoming a data scientist, you should take the required Python 101 that is required but also the advanced Python nobody else takes. By doing this alone, you will be in a very good position on the job market & getting an internship should be cake after a few classes. Aside your coursework, you want to be practicing you newly learned skills. This can be done a couple ways:
It is important for me to mention here: There is not a right way to become a very skilled engineer at any point in your career, but knowing what your want and taking micro actions daily. Try your best and you will be just fine
- Internships/Co-op/Student Employee:
The fastest/best way to practice and learn in IT is through a job. You want to get a job at your school IT department when you’re living on campus, and an internship during break when you are back home. Ideally, you want to work about 2 full year in IT by the time you graduate. The kind of job you get/title doesn’t really matter until your last internship/job right before graduation and transitioning to your big boy/girl job. You must manage for this last job to be around what you will be pursuing after college. This becomes proof for potential employers that you are ready to rock, and so will cost less on boarding and training. Thus, they won’t mind paying more for a new grad with 2 proven years of experience in the field compaired to a new grad with 3 months experience.
For instance, if you want to be automation engineer, you last internship before getting your degree should be around automating stuffs where you are working on real life situation. Also do not over work yourself, 12 to 20 hrs of work should be just fine. You goal is to successfully complete some key projects at work, school and home that you can talk about during your interview.
- Extra curriculum involvement
Outside of class, it is also important to build a network. This might be how you land your first job, find or become co-founder on startup, find a wife…. The best way of networking at this stage is through being member of on campus clubs and attending networking meetups. You want to be consistent, and hangout where like minded people be. Try to be an active member, or at least pick up a light responsibility every other weeks to make yourself and your latest adventure known. This does not mean to go out of your way bragging and becoming the smartest dude in the room, your mission is to find out about people, so let them tell you more about them, while you seat back and watch.
Making blog is also a great way to get people to be interested in networking with you. Ultimately, you will leverage all these extra activities as soft skills on your resume.
Major Huddles and How to Overcome them
The first issue you might run into is becoming knowledgeable too quick. This will cause you to walk in a class and already knowing almost everything in the syllabus. If you run into this, you want to talk to your advisor and the professor and try to get them to bypass you that class, and register you in the next level class. The next issue is less easy to handle.
Around your senior year, you might want to study a topic that is not offered at your school or even run out of classes relevant to your goal. The solution to this problem is to start taking on independent studies. Independent studies give you a chance to study advanced/recent topics that your school doesn’t or can’t teach. It’s a great way to become very competitive in the job market, but the downside is the lack of support. Your professor will not give you any material, but will hold you accountable for making progress. I suggest you get a membership with an online learning platform to support your studies.
A few I personally used are:
- Udemy
- A cloud guru
A few extra gems for the road:
Being so focused on a single goal can be very draining, and you will be tempted to ditch society and become a loner. But the main reason anyone should be working this hard is to achieve a better quality of life. So, occasionally I advise you to take a break and think about doing things that will help you to build a very strong social circle that will last forever. I’m talking about making time for people, going on dates, watching movies, going to sports games, joining a frat, taking trips, and partying as much as you can. It took me a while to figure out that it would be sad to work this hard to get to the finish line and have no one there to celebrate you when you cross it. Can you imagine how depressing it’d be to make enough money to throw the world’s greatest party but have almost nobody but your family members come through??
I’m not saying befriend everyone and party every night. But with time, you will find your balance.
Lastly, consider starting a blog or creating social media accounts (LinkedIn and Insta) where you post regularly about things you are experiencing on this journey. Take a lot of pictures and enjoy the ride as much as you can.
I wish you all the best. Good luck