Welcome back to my blog.
How is summer going? Hope everyone is grea
So, what do I do in Summer? continued..
Internship (training in a company)
I wanted to talk a-lot about this topic. It is one of the topics that I don't have a yes or no answer. Companies are also very different from each other. You must decide if you will or will not benefit from a specific internship.
Should I go to work, or not?
I'll discuss some advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
1. Soft skills:
One of the ways to learn softskills is through internship and real experience.
2. Language skills:
Can help your English, but english course is better.
3. Computer Science Topics:
Unfortunately, most companies will not teach you anything important. There are exceptions, but still most will either not teach you at all, or will give you useless courses.
Disadvantages:
1. Opportunity cost:
Do you remember what opportunity cost means? We took it in business in first year. It is the cost of the second best alternative. If you go to work, you may be missing the opportunity to learn really important things (see What to do this Summer - Part 1).
Summary
You can take an internship if and only if there is nothing else better for you to do (or the company is too good).
Helping Others
All the things I said till now are to help improve yourself, but don't forget about others.
Everyone has a debt for his knowledge to the Drs, TAs, colleagues, and family that taught him/her, he can only pay back that debt by passing the knowledge to others.
If you want to help others, I will help you by telling you some ways to do it.
1. Join a community (in FCI or outside FCI):
Most communities in FCI teach courses or sessions to help other students.
Make sure that you are not wasting time and that you are teaching something useful
2. Give a course:
You don't have to be in a community to give a course. If you are very good at that topic, you can easily give a course (and you may even get paid for it)
3. Help students younger than you:
How many of us could have used help from 3rd year students in 2nd/1st year?
Would it make a difference to a first year student if he heard advice about FCI from older students?
YES, it would. I know that because it happened to me.
Talk to some students, explain to them what they want to know. Give them advice on which subjects are important. Give them websites to help them. Even give them some of your old programs to see.Etc.
3. Write articles to others:
If you found this blog helpful, spread it, or even better, make articles like these and spread them to others.
If you know some new technology that can really help us, tell others.
Other Important stuff
There are things I didn't mention not because they are not important or to tell you not to do them, but I left them because they are essential things that I don't think I have to tell you about, they must be your priority too.- Family
- Religion
- Taking rest
- Sport
Summary:
Time is THE most important thing ever to humans. We will be asked in front of Allah how did we spend our time.
Summer is a lot of time. Try filling it up with useful stuff.
Hope you all have a great summer.
Share your Ideas for summer with us, comment this blog.
Thanks,
Amr Samir
