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Comment by alexgartrell | Hacker News Reader

Work on an open source project. A real one. Mozilla is super-friendly to new guys, and working on Chromium means working with Google Engineers and other smart people.

Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

You should probably consider working for a medium-sized company. Large companies have a tendency towards being soul crushing places for interns. A strong, almost-all-of-the-time tendency. The only exceptions might be Google or Facebook, but your odds of getting in there with only introductory programming. Most big companies want interns that they can recruit.

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Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

Seconded. Going to Northwestern has been a big leg up so far. Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS) may be the difference in getting an interview or not (where you can really show off ;)).

Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS)

Informational question here from an onlooker:

What's the recent consensus about which schools are the top twenty or thirty schools in CS, especially for a young person with an interest in start-up Web service work as contrasted with Wall Street or Big Company work?

Starting a list: Brown, CMU, MIT, Waterloo, BYU, UWashington, Stanford, RPI, Cornell, Cal

For more of a startup culture, gravitate more towards the coasts. Stanford is probably the best.

Northwestern ;)

Also, U Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard, Yale (rest of the Ivies), Caltech, UChicago.

I'm sure that there are others. Personally I'm a big proponent of the liberal arts education so I'd probably put schools with very good general programs closer to the top, but that's my personal belief.

LOL BYU?? Is that a joke? Or are you just clueless?

Damn man, your account is only 30 days old and you're already at -3 karma? Shooting for a record or something?

The credited way to disagree with a statement that some computer science department is a top-thirty department is to name thirty other departments that are better, with rationale.

Even if wallflower made a mistake, that would be no reason to be disrespectful.

I'll do that. I've contributed to some small projects, but I was psyching myself out from working on big open source projects. There are probably all sorts of bugs that would be tedious for the experienced coders to fix, so that's probably a good place to start?

I'm assuming he's already a senior because she's a National Merit Finalist.

Where are you going to college?

I'm still waiting to hear back from several schools. Still a week to wait.

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