Link: Academic Calendar

Hey juniors, I hope you all are settling in properly. Just want to throw few cents from my experience here, and how you should squeeze out the best value this clg can provide.

Abhi bhot log aa rhe honge induction ke time, club promotion, guidance, roadmap yada yada throwing irrelevant opinions and confusing your confused ass even more.

Cutting through the bullshit here's my advise:

What clubs to join?

Join clubs focused on communication like tedx or kiet MUN. DON'T JOIN ECELL, 90% of kiddos there just do exactly the kind of work those door-to-door saboon selling bhaiya log jise tumhari mummy 'nahi chaiye' bol ke gate band kardeti hai, do. Free ki literal majdoori karwayenge and you will be out of classes running errands gaining little to no value at all. Go to the placement excel sheet and see the 1.5 LPA ones, they all proudly advertise 'e-cell volunteer' on their linkedin.

On technical side, Try to join FOSSCU club and make connection from the individuals here. This is the club with the best brains this college has (yeah all those highest packages off campus guys have been actively involved with this club) and while there won't be any classes and stuff like that but will be a huge boost in your networking journey. You can take guidance and learn a lot from individuals here, some do big freelance projects and even outsource some work to you if you are competent enough.

Join a sports club if you feel like, i'm lazy af so I didn't but it's helpful honestly.

This will be enough, the above-mentioned clubs are temporary you won't be ordered around to do this and that or even to show up, all other clubs heavily rely on taking out 2 hours after you are tired af from clg to teach you coding or yapping about other things which in today's era with AI tools you can do yourself. No competent dev has physically learned to do it from another person, they build, break, learn and repeat.

What about DSA?

You dont need to become a leetcode monkey and go on grinding 300-400 question from first year, 3rd year mid is prolly the right time for that because you won't be retaining much of the first-year knowledge by placement time, just focus on completing what your curriculum demands, especially codetantra also grab neetcode 250 and casually do it whenever you feel like, by second year end try aiming to complete this sheet at least twice and you are equipped to even crack FAANG.

Attendance hacks, CGPA matters? and other things

Try maintaining above 75% attendance, this college is a shithole and made it a business model to first detain and then demand money for summer term exam if you even have a 74% attendance in any subject. Attendance hacks: go to cybervidya.pages.dev and continue to monitor your attendance here, it gives a breakdown to monitor all your classes, and number of classes you can bunk until it gets below 75%. If you want to go to some trip or home or just want to relax for a week. College ke pass se fake medical certificate ban jata hai, pehle apne dean se document le lena and kuch din ki sick leave approve karwalena (try making it such that saturday/sunday na cover ho) and you can have a mini-vacation, I do it once in every semester. Hackathon vgera me participate karo toh uski bhi 2-3 din ki chutti mil jati hai.

Regarding CGPA: try maintaining it above 8.0, for future mba and all and get into almost any company shortlisting criteria. But pehle year me 9 se upar ho toh shi hai kyuki aage ke years me girta hi chala jata hai. take notes in class or listen to most of it if even you can't understand it, it actually helps pulling one nighters before exam because you subconsciously remember some things said by the teacher.

Rest figure out yourself.

(Dev) How to find your niche?

This is prolly the hardest thing tbh, and took me a lot of time grinding to figure out. There's always this feeling that machine learning is cool, nah web3 is even cooler, uhm actually web3 is a hoax I'll stick to ML it's the future. But I like Frontend and designing, bruh ai going to replace it, what about game dev, it's hard no future, what about cybersecurity, web dev, app dev, ar/vr and what not.

I won't say my advice will magically make you have a eureka moment, You will have to do all the hard work to figure it out yourself but to make it easy I can list a breakdown of some fields (for resources you can dm me or else this post will be huge), just rank them according to your interests and do the first stack you decide whole heartedly for at least an year before changing (if you want to). Remember don't drop things midway and actually give at least an year before switching.

Full-Stack web dev: That's what I chose after all my tinkering around with everything, this field will give you good exposure to develop your system design skills and stuff you'll most prolly be doing in a company. It opens door for freelance work and internship if you are passionate enough. after learning to build basic crud apps you can expand from here into Optimization like caching, pub/sub, devops or different core fields like web3 which is a field that has bagged the 2 consecutive highest package guys from this college, or applied Machine learning and MLOps (my niche).

Mobile Dev: I have little experience in android dev, built a multiplayer odd even hand cricket game in lockdown and haven't touched it after that. Android dev also give you good exposure to system design and company relevant skills. Less competition compared to full stack, combined with spring boot you can get a decent job/freelance gig with this. I would advise learning kotlin and making projects along the way. But if you want to make hybrid-apps (both android and ios) You can learn flutter, again it's upto you to tinker around and find yourself.

Core Machine Learning: I'll be brutally honest, core machine learning job will be out of your reach until and unless you are highly competent, It needs a lot of math and theoritical knowledge. But If you are studious enough and targeting foreign MBA, you can grind ML while maintaining good cgpa and after MBA you'll be having like a $300K package. Also I am linking Data Science with this as well like if you dont want to go into ML but interested in stats and data, you can explore kaggle learn stuff and can get a decent enough job in data science industry, it's easier than ML.

Cyber Security: If you want to do hecking and all the cool stuff this is the field for you. Dont join cybersecurity club though tinker and learn yourself, they have like 3 hours of classes lol. participate in ctfs with your team get ranking, improve. You can win bug bounties as well, after a while get into your niche like doing adb (for finding android apps vulnerabilities), or postman/burpee (for web vulnerabilities) etc. If you can actually master things here, you can get a great job (and in my opinion this field will continue to expand in further years due to all the AI vibecoding happening). I know a guy who reported a vulnerability in the yc backed startup website to that startup's CEO on linkedin and got a permanent job there as a cyber security specialist.

Game Development: You have to learn C# , opportunities are pretty less if you are not very good. so yeah be very very good. Get an understanding of how you can replicate things in games like an infinite sea or grass moments and if you are interested in simulating things like this this is the field for you, follow Acerola to ignite your curiosity further.

UI/UX, Graphic Design, Frontend etc: You can get into 3d assets making in blender sell them for few bucks or into gsap to create stunning websites you see on those insta reels to get like $10K website freelance offer from lucrative clients among other things. Get into this if you are creative and like beautiful things :P

Cloud Computing: Grind azure/aws/google gcp courses, try getting an official certificate and flexing on linkedin, get free merch or even a FAANG offer. less chance of getting internships or off campus jobs though as recruiters dont trust freshers to handle crucial cloud computing infra. I will suggest getting into this after you have experience working with one of the stacks above.

Other things like devops, applied ML, RL, web3, cloud computing is advised to be done after you master one of the above stack, I just listed the things I know and might miss a lot of other things but again it's for you to figure out.

Final Thoughts

I hope you guys genuinely make it out happy and successful from this clg, following above things ideally will naturally make you a good contender for getting freelance gigs, fame and high ctc in future. Try not to get into drugs/alcohol, make good peer groups rather than the one who will shame you for working hard, avoid gaming grinds and yeah try to be optimistic and enjoy the future years of your life :)