Great advice (not just about Google) from Laszlo Bock, the head of hiring at Google:
How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2 – NYTimes.com.
Here is the advice that I would add: (I commented on the NYTimes site.)
You need to make sure that your college or university is fullfilling the requirements Mr. Bock talks about. To start with, he notes that
a “…degree is not a proxy anymore for having the skills and traits to do any job…”
I would add that even a degree from a so-called “elite” school may not be such a proxy, even in computer science. There are many reasons for this. The simplest is grade inflation; but the scariest for your future is to go somewhere where “content deflation” runs rampant throughout the curricula. “Content deflation” is one way schools cater to consumers (once quaintly called “students”) so that they feel good about themselves and their school. Mr. Bock is clear that he wants real content, real study and a real acquisition of analytical skills.
It will be hard for you to find out if your school is really teaching you. After all, you are not yet an expert on whether it matters to your future that you read all those novels, understand what they are about, and explain what you think in an essay. (Hint: Want to move up the corporate ladder? Better not leave meetings wondering what people said.) You also don’t know yet how much calculus you need to understand, or why. I could go on.
I have advice, stories and data on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com that will help you, but you need to go online, look at the material covered in courses, look at the tests, look at the grade distributions. Ask about graduates and salaries.
To paraprase Mr. Bock: Calling an instittution a college or university is not a proxy anymore for such an institution being a place where people really learn.
I taught undergrad philosophy at Carnegie Mellon most of the way through the 1990’s–my secondary campus job, the primary job being research in computer science. Neither of these departments practiced content deflation.
In my teaching job we stood solidly against grade inflation. The main source of pressure for grade inflation appeared to be parents, both indirectly and, I regret to say, occasionally directly. As a mere Instructor, I had nothing to lose from sending an interfering parent packing, and in fact I did so more than once. There was no way I was going to cheat a student by giving less than full and honest measure, and the more obnoxious the parent, the more I suspected the student needed honest support. After all, this is the family that kid has to go home to during break; better to send them home with an improved capacity for critical thinking and thus better coping skills.
My experience has been that students do often know when they are getting cheated in their education, but they may not know how to interpret this, or may not take appropriate action on it. I certainly knew when I was getting cheated in my own education; years later, that probably made me a better teacher. Sometimes I heard from students that they didn’t feel challenged by a particular assignment, or that somebody I’d had to ask to fill in for me on a certain date didn’t measure up to their standards as an instructor. As cringe-inducing as getting called on the quality issue might be for me as a teacher, I also found it to be cause for celebration.
Problems arise when students don’t understand that a good education is supposed to challenge them, haven’t regularly encountered challenge, don’t know how to handle it or equate it with failure, are convinced that asking for help means losing face or worse, know that something’s missing but [don’t] really know what that is, don’t know how to ask for more or fear engaging such a discussion, believe that bringing a C up to a B is still a disaster, and so on and so forth. Parents can be part of the problem, part of the solution, or functionally out of the picture. I found it helpful to (among other things) encourage a student peer environment where both high expectations and appropriate collaboration were valued.
I was fortunate to have taught in a place that not only supported this approach, but insisted on it.
Thanks for your comment. I have added a post where I compare your experience with CMU”s administration with Wash. U. in St. Louis’ administration.