My fingers have been aching weirdly since the past few days, and I can barely balance myself as I am now consistently dizzy. Also have been having some...control issues. Being a full-time student I want to know if anybody else is struggling with things like this and how they are managing.
I am about to enter my third year of college, but it is not like I did not put in any effort in the first two years; I did. A shit ton. But in the wrong direction; nobody told me how important DSA was, so even getting an internship seems hard right now. I do want to give it my all, but I feel as if everything is finished. So would really appreciate if I could hear from a few developers who have been through the same but still made it in the end. I know it sounds corny but yeah.
Ps. I am from india
- Did the leetcode potd, once I saw that all the steps were given in the question itself, I was a little skeptical but tried as instructed anyway. Needless to say, it worked, not much time spent on it.
- Did a mock interview of operating systems + computer networks, studied whatever I was lacking...again
- Did time series forecasting theory all over again, as I've used it in a project and needed to revise it.
Had to travel back to college, so couldn't do much but enough to move a step forward.
Did nothing but register for interns and leetcode POTD. A pretty unproductive day. I was rethinking posting, but if I have to hold myself accountable, gotta keep up. Hopefully I can salvage today.
- Woke up late, but a girl needs her 6-7 hour sleep
- Did LeetCode POTD, had to scratch my brain a little, my first thought was digit dp, which I know sounds like using an axe for cutting a banana. Then I realized there were about 36 patterns, generated them via code, and solved the problems with constraints.
- Solved 2 Leetcode hards, one with the K marbles in bags (Leetcode 2551), which was just picking the best pairs. I obviously used DP first, got MLE, then had to see the solution for the greedy approach. Can say once the key idea was unlocked, I felt pretty dumb.
- The second LeetCode hard was (LC 1671), it was pretty easy if one knows LIS I did an O(n^2) approach, but I am planning for an O(nlogn) today
- Did 3 CSES problems, because I hadn't touched CSES in days. The problems were pretty simple, though, making a palindromic string, something to do with apples, and coin piles. I found the apple problem interesting. I had considered multiple approaches, like dp and prefix sum + binary search, but finally settled on masking when I realized it was just subset generation. The other 2 are not worth discussing, but don't mistake me for thinking that I got them right the first time
- Did some networking and registered for a few hackathons
- Prepared for cs fundamentals via questions (120), verbally answering whatever I could, else hitting up Gemini.
Overall, I could have done more if I hadn't wasted 2 hours watching Gossip Girl. I wasn't very productive, but I will try to increase the workload.
We see people on the internet all the time who have cracked 8 internships, have research papers, are Codeforces grandmasters, and feel inadequate. I am about to enter my third year, having completed one unpaid internship, many projects, and some hackathon wins, and I am realizing how far I have come from the kid who didn't even know Windows was an operating system when she joined college (I am not kidding). Am I FAANG worthy right now? Well, no. Of course not. But I want to be better. I might not be exceptional now, but I want to be exceptional in the upcoming 5 years, and good enough by the next. So I am going to start a journey documenting things, and I hope we can all set out on it together.
Bottom line: do not lose hope; your time might come later, but if you keep trying, it will.