Three years in, here’s what stuck and what didn’t.
What stuck
Networks. I came in thinking software was the interesting part. Three semesters later I realised that almost every interesting bug, security incident, and outage I’d ever read about was a network bug in disguise. Networks are the soft underbelly of every system.
Working in teams. University group projects are notoriously bad. They’re bad in instructive ways — you learn quickly how to communicate when half the team disappears, how to pin down requirements that keep changing, how to ship something passable when “perfect” was never on the table.
Reading the docs. First year I’d panic and Google. Third year I’d start with the official docs. The official docs are nearly always faster.
What didn’t
A lot of the lecture-hall theory I crammed for, then forgot. The stuff I built or wrote about, I still know.
What I’d tell first-year me
- Pick units by the lecturer, not the title. A great lecturer on a boring-sounding topic beats a bored lecturer on an exciting one.
- Office hours are free tutoring. Show up.
- Side projects matter. Not because of “the portfolio” — because they’re how you find out what you actually like.
- It’s fine to not know what you’re doing in second year. Most people are pretending. The ones who aren’t pretending also don’t know.
Looking forward to the research years.