I regret being a generalist in college. Take the harder systems classes, not the AI ones. There is always compute infrastructure to maintain no matter what the product is, so that’s where the jobs are.
They get your tasks done. But if you want to move things at a bigger scale, you have to be good with people: convincing them your idea will work, working around the politics. I’d generally prefer to write code all day, but given how FAANG is structured you often need to talk to the team that owns a tool you depend on and ask them to change it.
Always be picking up something new, on and off work, the same as college. Go a little extra and learn another language, another design pattern. I call it the nights-and-weekends nerd out, and I enjoy it because I’ve liked CS since middle school and never stopped.
You need good reading and writing. Reading means large technical documents describing complex designs written by very senior people. Writing means the reports that keep your manager in the loop.
I go to as few as I can unless they really matter. That still comes out to about three a day, and it’s still too much.
No relation to engineering ability whatsoever. The most cracked engineers on my team went to schools you haven’t heard of and wouldn’t consider prestigious, and they’re still the most cracked engineers on my team.
I barely spend anything on food during the week. The medical insurance is extremely good for what you pay into it. The 401k matching is generous, though I won’t see that money for another forty years. The rest of the benefits are so-so.
Way up from my college days. My own apartment. Finally replaced the car that used to break down constantly. A little saved on the side. The signing and relocation bonuses really helped set things up at the start.
Real. PTO helps. It has also gotten better as I’ve gotten comfortable with the codebase and the tooling.
If you’re earlier in the pipeline than this, I also wrote about whether the CS major is still worth it and how the eight CS-related majors at UCI differ.
]]>Stay if this is what you’d want to be doing for the next thirty years. If you’ll put in hours outside of class because you want to, not because a syllabus told you to. If a hackathon sounds like a fun weekend. If you’d build the thing in your head just to watch it work. If you’d still take the job at a teacher’s salary.
Leave if you’re only here for the money. Or because everyone in your friend group is doing it. Or because your parents would be disappointed otherwise. Or because someone on TikTok made it look like software engineers get paid to sit around.
And leaving is fine. Genuinely. You’re going to work for thirty-plus years, and you can’t spend all of it hating your job. The world is big and you might turn out to be great at something you haven’t tried yet. If you’re weighing a switch, I wrote a guide to all eight CS-related majors at UCI that covers where each one leads.
Yeah, but it’s been getting better, not worse. The 2023 grads got hit hardest. 2024 was a little easier. With rates coming down, I’m seeing a lot more postings for 2025 and beyond. Google barely hired anyone in 2023 or 2024 and is back on campus now with real headcount.
Standing out. There are just too many people applying. Almost every UCI student lists the CS 122B project on their resume, so if that’s your whole portfolio, you aren’t ahead of anyone. You’re exactly average. Recruiters don’t care much about class projects.
What works is building something yourself and getting actual users on it. That’s a lot of nights in your room while your friends are out, and it’s hard to talk yourself into it if you don’t like the work.
No. Interviews have gotten harder, sure. 50 problems used to be enough, and now it’s closer to 200. But past 250, you’re mostly wasting your time. It’s the same data structures with a new coat of paint. The “1000 or you’re doomed” thing isn’t real. If you genuinely enjoy competitive programming, then go nuts. Just don’t grind out of fear.
Think of it as a funnel and work out where it’s leaking. Roughly, for citizens and green card holders:
| Stage | Rough conversion |
|---|---|
| Applications to OA | 30 to 1 |
| OAs to first round | 20 to 10 |
| Final rounds to offer | 10 to 1 or 2 |
Then fix whichever stage is leaking:
If the resume is the thin part because you haven’t held a job yet, an on-campus one is the easiest place to start. I applied to 78 of them and wrote up how the process works.
I won’t put numbers on this for international students. Sponsorship throws the numbers off so badly that I’d just be making them up.
Semi-target. Offers aren’t going to fall out of the sky the way they might at an HYPSM career fair, but the school on your resume isn’t what’s screening you out either. At most companies a UCI CS degree gets you past the first cut, and after that it’s your projects and experience doing the work. Quant firms are pickier, though I’ve watched people from here land offers at top quant shops, so maybe I’m wrong about that too.
]]>All eight are undergraduate majors ending in a B.S., spread across three schools. ICS owns most of them, while Engineering and Business each run a joint major with ICS.
One warning: every school sets its own rules for switching in, and those rules change. Use this post to work out what you want, then go ask a counselor in that school whether you can actually get there.
The main ICS program, and the most theoretical of the bunch. You’ll cover the things a computer scientist is expected to know: databases, networking, data structures, and algorithms. Mostly Python, C++, and Java.
It also leaves the most doors open. Frontend, backend, full stack, web, mobile, and SRE, which is what I ended up doing.
Best for: almost any software role, and anyone who isn’t sure yet.
CE lives in the Engineering school and sits much closer to the metal. Computer organization, compilers, assembly, memory management, and the boundary where hardware and software meet. Expect to write a lot of C. Since it’s an Engineering degree, you also pick up the math, physics, and chemistry requirements.
Best for: hardware companies like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, where firmware and hardware roles want people who know what’s happening underneath.
ICS launched this one in fall 2019, and it’s far more hands-on than CS. Lower division looks almost identical, but upper division swaps in courses like web development and interaction design, plus a senior design project where you build something real with a team. It’s the closest thing to an actual job you’ll do in school. You get the usual languages plus frontend stacks: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the frameworks around them.
Best for: people who know they want to build applications and have zero interest in hardware.
Roughly three quarters software engineering, one quarter social science, psychology, and cognitive science. It’s the lightest workload of the group, which still means a lot of work. Informatics treats CS as a tool for something else you care about: law, social work, mental health, design.
Best for: the part of software that humans actually touch. Product management, UI/UX, and interaction design.
CSE is a joint ICS and Engineering major, basically half CS and half CE. It has a reputation as one of the hardest majors on campus, and it earns that reputation. You take:
Most people I know who started in CSE moved to CS within a year.
Best for: people who want CS outcomes with hardware still on the table.
This one is about data from end to end: collecting it, analyzing it, and working out what it means. The department likes to say you learn to tell a story with data. Expect a lot of math and statistics with CS courses mixed in.
One caveat worth knowing early: if you specifically want to be a machine learning engineer, plan on grad school. A bachelor’s usually isn’t enough for those roles.
Best for: data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers.
GDIM is for making games. It grew out of the old Computer Game Science major and covers both sides: programming as well as art and story, ending with a senior project where your team ships a game. You’ll write mostly C#, since that’s what a lot of engines use.
As far as I know, USC is the only other school in California with a program like it, so this is an unusual thing for UCI to have. I’m not a gamer myself, but GDIM people impress me. Blizzard is also right here in Irvine, pulling students out of this major every year.
Best for: anyone set on the game industry.
Jointly run by Merage and ICS. The name gives it away: roughly half business administration and half informatics. It’s a popular second major, which is how I ended up with it alongside CS. It’s also a decent landing spot if you wanted Business Administration and couldn’t get in, since it comes with priority enrollment for some Merage classes.
Best for: project management, product management, and business analyst work.
| Major | School | Points toward |
|---|---|---|
| CS | ICS | Software engineering, broadly |
| CE | Engineering | Firmware, hardware |
| SWE | ICS | Application development |
| INF | ICS | Product, UI/UX, design |
| CSE | ICS + Engineering | Software, with hardware optional |
| DS | ICS | Data science, analytics, ML |
| GDIM | ICS | Game development |
| BIM | Business + ICS | Product, business analysis |
If you’re less sure about the field itself than about which major to pick, I also wrote about whether the CS degree is still worth it after graduating into this market.
This is one student’s view, written in my fourth year. Requirements change, programs get added, and your counselor is the one who actually knows. Use it to narrow things down, then go confirm the details.
]]>Studying in America has held its appeal for a long time, partly because of history and partly because of the pressure students feel today. In the 80s and 90s, only the very top students got government money to study abroad, which made an American degree a marker of success. Most families now pay for it themselves, but that sense of prestige stuck around, and it still shapes why an American education is so wanted.
The one-child policy raised the stakes. With only one shot per family, competition for spots at good Chinese universities is brutal, and the top schools accept as few as 0.1 to 2 percent of applicants. Going to America is a way around that fight while keeping the status, and it spares students from being seen as having failed.
Chinese students who come to a school like UCI for undergrad usually come from upper-middle-class families back home, often with $3 million to $10 million in assets. Their parents tend to be executives, directors, or doctors, or they own a sizable business. Some have ties to the government, but few are officials themselves. These families take education seriously and are willing to spend a lot on it.
A year at UCI runs about $80k for a Chinese student. Most families can pay that out of pocket, so the student graduates with no debt and, in some cases, lives pretty well. Rules on moving money out of China do put a ceiling on things, though, so you rarely see a Lamborghini. Most drive something in the $40k to $80k range, since they pay cash and have little credit history in the US.
Not every international student sits in that bracket. Plenty work on campus, which is the only kind of job an F-1 visa allows to begin with, and I wrote a guide to getting an on-campus job at UCI after applying to 78 of them.
Getting ready for an American college starts early, often in middle school. Families pay for private English tutoring and usually send their kids to international high schools that follow an American curriculum. Some students go to American private high schools, since public ones mostly take local students.
Some international students do cheat, but it is nowhere near as common as people think. There are other stereotypes too: that they only use WeChat, that they only hang out with other international students. Most of that comes from the language barrier and from wanting to be around something familiar. As students settle in, they branch out, which mostly shows what time and a little understanding can do.
The other thing waiting for them is paperwork. I built OPTimize, an iOS app that walks F-1 students through OPT work authorization, because the rules are genuinely hard to follow. And for the housing side of being at UCI, there is my take on the campus housing crisis.
]]>Aldrich Park, known for being the quiet green heart of campus, is about to look a little different. The university plans to put up a limited number of sturdy, well-furnished tents. The move, officials say, shows both a willingness to try unusual ideas and a desire to take some pressure off the housing squeeze right away.
“Our students come first. The housing crisis has made it clear that we need answers we can act on now. Using Aldrich Park for temporary housing came up as a short-term step while we work on the long-term ones,” said Dr. Emily Davis, UCI’s Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs.
Each tent comes with electricity and Wi-Fi, so students can live comfortably. The tents do not come with private showers or bathrooms. To help with costs, the university is working with local restaurants and businesses to offer cheap meals and other basics. Campus security and maintenance teams will be on site to keep tent residents safe.
Odd as the plan sounds, UCI officials believe it will ease the housing shortage and bring students closer together. “Aldrich Park has always been the center of campus life. Turning it into temporary housing gives students a roof and a rare chance to meet each other, work together, and make friends that last,” Dr. Davis said.
The university is also talking with local organizations about extra support, including counseling and academic help, so tent residents can focus on their classes.
Student reaction is mixed. Some like the creative thinking. Others worry about privacy and safety. The administration says it will put full measures in place to handle those worries and keep the tents safe and livable for everyone.
As for the price, UCI says each tent will cost $900 a month, paid by the quarter. That covers the basics and the experience of living in Aldrich Park, though again, no private shower or bathroom. The university says the price is meant to sit somewhere between affordable and convenient.
Using Aldrich Park for housing shows how far UCI is willing to go to solve a real problem. As the university takes this unusual step, other schools around the country are watching to see whether it catches on at campuses facing the same shortage.
Satire, in case the $900 tents did not give it away. For the unsatirical version of what UCI costs, see what a year here actually runs an international student, or how to land an on-campus job if you are trying to cover rent.
]]>From my observation, on-campus jobs can be categorized into four types:
Jobs that align with your major (Example: Software Engineer, IT Support, Administrative Assistant)
Jobs that align with your interests (Example: Video Editor, Graphic Designer)
Research-related jobs (Example: Research Assistant, Data Entry Clerk, Equipment Maintenance)
Low-skilled jobs (Example: Meal Server, Library Checkout Clerk, ARC Desk Worker)
Figure out what you actually want first. Weigh the pros and cons above, then decide where to spend your applications.
What I usually recommend is finding a job that lines up with your career goals and gives your resume something to build on. You could take a food server job for better pay, but it will not move your career forward. You are still in college, and you will make far more if you land at a good company after graduation. So taking a $5 an hour pay cut now is worth it for being a stronger candidate as a senior, unless you really need the cash.
Some examples to give you ideas:
I prepared two resumes for different types of positions.
The data below is from August 2021 to September 2021.
* This means the manager viewed the application on Handshake.
An on-campus job is a good first line on a resume, but it is not the one recruiters end up screening on. For what comes after it, I wrote about what actually makes CS recruiting hard and what the first year of a full-time job in big tech looks like.
Good luck with your job search!
]]>