Thinking of what to do after college? This will be an incremental post with Many and Many edits, where I try to cover as many career paths as possible. Feel free to add the career paths which you think are reasonable in the comment section.
General Advice for College:
Before we start, letme state some general advice for college:
i) Maintain GPA Above 8.5
ii) Do not think that completing college courses is enough.
iii) Practice alot of self learning and complete MOOCs if necessary
iv) Get Certified, if you want to go into finance, do a CFA/CA, if you want to be an ethical hacker, do a CEH, if you want to be a project manager, complete CAPM.
v) Utilize your holidays: Use your holidays for internships/research internships and learning new things.
vi) Put all your projects available on GitHub (if Non-Commercial)
vii) Try to get a high ranking in Coding websites/Kaggle
Careers:
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Software Engineering → As many of you might be aware of this path, I will finish this one in the end. Essentially, finish the cracking the coding interview book for a job and you should be set. Known to be the highest paying job in the modern world.
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Data Science/Data Engineering/Data Analyst: Earlier, Data Science was limited to Tableau and Such, it just included deriving decisions out of data, but around 2010, everything changed, the world began to explore machine learning and deep learning in commercial systems and now data science almost anywhere is based around this. Although programming skills can help you, I highly recommend you to delve deep into Statistics and Linear Algebra even before getting to the programming part. Make sure you can code each library on your own(With a little help from stack overflow) before you start to use it. Please learn deployment, Not only is it very necessary in large organizations, it will allow you to do crazy things on your own. Data Visualization is a key to presenting the information you have extracted out of the data you have got and is also key.
READ MORE: Machine Learning Resources! -
Entrepreneurship/Serial Entrepreneurial Skills: This is a very off the normal career path(although you will meet many fake entrepreneurs nowadays). To be a true entrepreneur, you need to have a tremendous amount of persistence, hard-working attitude and a self-drive like none other. At the beginning, you will have to do everything, any job from the bottom to the top is not too low for you and as a CEO you should have the capacity to execute a vision that you see fit for the company, all the while chasing VCs and getting employees on-boarded as well. Now, the main question i have heard at times from entrepreneurs is, I have an Idea, but how do i get started? Alright, there are many ways, you could just go about implementing your idea for 5 months, build a prototype and then struggle for funding, but some of the easiest ways of getting started and getting funding are:
Y-Combinator’s Startup School
Entrepreneur First
Y-Combinator’s Original Program
Thiel’s Fellowship(will have to drop out of college)
Shark Tank, LoL
IF Starting your company from scratch and want funding:
i) Make an Outstanding Slide Deck
ii) Have an Amazing Website
iii) Have an Amazing Idea
iv) Send Cold Emails to VCs or Set up a meeting with as many VCs as possible. Try to get meetings with Venture Associates or similar at VCs, they have the power to recommend you to get funding, which will not only boost your startup, but their careers. Believe it or not, almost all VCs read the emails that they get, It is as essential for their business as much it is for you. -
Venture Capital Associate (Pre-MBA)/ MBA/ Venture Associate (Partner Track): Entrepreneurship is alright, but i don’t want to take the risks but want a part of the payout… what do i do? Yes, you heard it right, that is infact possible, join a Venture Captial Firm. Invest in Startups, Get a part of their latest crazy sell off, sounds like a dream job, right? The part of the crazy sell off is only for the general partners though… so wait for another 5-7 years. Start as a VC Associate with a relatively low salary, still doing the same things, financial modeling, Investing in Startups and answering every email in your inbox and searching for viable startups to invest in. After a few years, get promoted to partner. Do the same things, but this time you get the buck, as simple as that. Listing down some VCs below:
JetBlue Ventures
Microsoft’s Venture Fund
Google Ventures -
Investment Banking
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Hedgefund Analyst
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Quantitative finance
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Private Equity Firms
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Accounting (Big 4) → CA/CPA
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Management Consulting (MBB)
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Project Manager → CAPM, PMP
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Program Manager/Product Manager → MBA
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Developer Relations
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Research jobs (AI) (PhD) : Please Get started on research papers and getting published and knowing experts in the field as soon as possible if you want to do a PhD at an amazing university. Start by doing Summer Research Internship programs preferably after your 2nd year, and if possible even your first year, delve deep into the particular field which you want to research into and publish 1-2 Heavy weight papers in the main conferences of the field ( Here Quality >>>>> Quantity). Make sure that the papers matter, and have some concrete research to them. Please Maintain your GPA, Pref. Above 9.5 , in PhD applications, your GPA, your Research and most of all Your relationship with the faculty you want to be guided by will be seen. Please form contact with the faculty first(preferably, atleast 1-2 years before) . A Good GRE Might have a good effect depending on the university. LoRs must be excellent and research-oriented. In most fields, research will be knowing the basics of everything and even the lower abstractions which people normally do not know. Which might be the mathematics behind neural networks, each statistical curve etc. Most research in CS might be very mathematical oriented and some might be very experiment oriented. Try with what feels best for you!
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(Chief of Staff) → GM → CXO
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Corporate Lawyer for Tech (Tech Degree + Lawyering degree(JD etc.), an additional MBA wouldn’t hurt)
Please provide reference for attribution
Disclaimer: Please use this advice with your situations and life in mind, I am not responsible for any harm caused due to this guide.