Advice for liberal arts CS students

I hear a lot of concerns from computer science (CS) students at Connecticut College (ConnColl) because they feel like their liberal arts education is inadequate to prepare them for a job in tech.

Looking at my transcript, you may think that I am super unqualified for my current position in Cloud computing at Google. I took the minimum number of CS courses for the major. I was a sociology major in my first year and only started Intro to CS in my sophomore year while juggling courses from many different departments: Philosophy, Arts, English…). Most of my CS courses were not industry oriented, but Math-heavy: linear algebra, discrete math, algorithms and theory of computation. But I managed. So I want to tell you about how I got the position at Google by embracing my liberal arts education and share with you some unqualified advice.

One, there is no substitution for curiosity, hard work, and courage. When I first took Intro to CS with professor Chung, I was immediately fascinated with the discipline. I downloaded a bunch of mobile apps to learn coding in Python, data structures, and algorithms. Sometimes I watched Crash Course, MIT OpenCourseware videos on YouTube during dinner or late at night. Although my interest in CS took dips and dives, small pockets of time that I spent learning outside of the classroom helped me become a much better learner and computer scientist. I asked professor Chung to adopt her web development project called CamelTours when I was still in the Intro class. CamelTours ended up being my independent study project for 2 years, which taught me almost everything I know about web technology. When you push yourself to go the extra mile and bear the responsibility to figure out something by yourself, you learn a lot! (Also, thank goodness for Stack Overflow and Quora.) I was not afraid to walk my own path within the CS department. When no one wanted to attend a hackathon with me, I went by myself. For two years, I presented my humble one-person projects at the MIT IEEE research conference, among sophisticated, government-sponsored, graduate-level research projects. I was never scared to look stupid, because I know at the very least, I will not be stupid forever if I put in the work.

Two, focus on people and cultivate a network. If you have a role model, approach them like a moth dashing towards a light bulb. I admire and look up to professor Chung a lot. That’s why I took every course possible with her and did all of my independent work under her mentorship. I wanted to absorb the way she thinks, solves problems, communicates, and treats people. When faced with a difficult question in my TA sessions, I always ask myself: “What would professor Chung do?” Don’t worry too much about being an original and doing things “your way”. You are constantly reflecting, picking and choosing what you want to learn from other people. Mentors and role models who are genuine will be flattered to know that you want to learn from them. During spring break of my sophomore spring, I reached out to 20 alumni and asked them to talk about their journey from ConnColl, current work, and some advice for their younger selves and for me. I still keep in touch with many of them until now. Phil Fritzsche ’13 helped me a lot with my growth mindset and shared plenty of pro tips before I went into my Google interview. Phil is a cloud engineer manager at Google and oversees a lot of hiring in his team. Right before I received an email from Google encouraging me to apply for the Cloud Technical Residency program in November 2018, I had signed up for the Out in Tech mentorship program in NYC in October. It is fair to say that I couldn’t have gotten through the grueling interview process at Google without my mentor — Spencer. He spent hours tutoring me on web knowledge and coding skills. He gave me mock interviews and cheered me on along the way. So did Dot Wang from the career office and professor Chung. Over my 4 years in college, I kept the wisdom that people had shared with me in a notebook and Google Docs. Every time I read these notes, I’m filled with gratitude and inspiration. I don’t believe anyone can have a self-made success story. I credit my achievements to the people who have supported me along the way.

Three, take ownership of your knowledge. I used to freeze when faced with a difficult question and people doubting my liberal arts education. It was a huge mental roadblock for me in job interviews and even daily lives. The feedback from Professor Chung after working with me for a summer was, “Khanh has the tendency to be self-deprecating. I believe he could go much further if he starts to take ownership of his ability”. After that, I treated it as an emergency to learn how to control and eliminate my self-doubts. I told myself I had only 20 minutes every single day to believe in myself. I keep a Rolodex of self-help quotes. I hope these quotes can be helpful to you.

• Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. It only makes you worse than you already are — Anne Lamott
• If you start believing in how high-value you are, as I do, you will project it during the interview, they will get the message — Christine Chung
• People are probably expecting less than you think — Spencer

There is tremendous power in knowing who you are and how you think. At the end of my senior year, I have learned to embrace my framework for problem solving. Upon receiving a problem, I first try to gather as much information as possible — question the assumptions, identify agents and agency. Then I try to find an intuitive, naive solution. Stop and evaluate. After that, I try to take a step back and see if there is a structure in the problem that can benefit from a heuristic approach. Stop and evaluate. Then I try to crank out the minimum structure of the solution. From there, I repeat the cycle of questioning, creating, and refining. With this framework, I spend less time dreading the problem, and more time solving it. Figure out a procedure that works for you, and be proud of it.

Finally, nurture your morals and values. I constantly reflect on my core values of perseverance, resilience, tolerance and kindness. Learning how to grief failures with grace and build off of success with humility is a life-long project. I am grateful to have role models, mentors, and friends who constantly remind me of how important these virtues are in life. In the spring semester of my junior year, I didn’t get an internship after hundreds of applications. I was interviewed by Google for the Developer Relations internship, but was rejected after the first phone screening. I was even rejected from the internship program at Yale ITS that I was accepted to just the year before. But I didn’t give up. Within 2 weeks before the spring semester ended, I managed to get 3 summer projects, very different from what I had hoped for, but could help me with housing and essential expenses. These projects also taught me a lot. Rejections are not the end of the world; they are precious learning opportunities. You learn how to bounce back, persist, and fend off jealousy after every failed attempt. Google ended up reaching out to me again a few months after the rejection and encouraged me to re-apply to the Cloud Technical Residence program. They thought this position was a “better fit” for me. They were right.

Many people that I look up to have very humble beginnings. Some worked tedious administrative jobs, waited tables or packed grocery bags. Everyone has their own different journey. The only constant truth to make that journey more meaningful and enjoyable is a combination of perseverance, resilience, tolerance and kindness.

I hope you find this helpful. I wrote this at 21, with very little life experience. But I felt it was important to tell my stories because I know many college students are nervous and scared. It is nice sometimes to hear a few suggestions, and for someone to say, “It’s all gonna be okay”. Many of my good friends in the CS department got amazing offers from other companies in different areas: AI, SWE, UX/UI,… Go ask them for their stories if you haven’t, because we each have a different journey. But we all embrace our time and education here at ConnColl’s CS department. We didn’t think that we must go to an engineering school, take “practical” courses, or push a ton of code to GitHub, to kick ass in technology. We operated on our own premises. So should you.