#Revisited : What to do in college?
Actionable Items
This newsletter issue is a continuation of the previous one, in which I talked about the general mindset and the company that you should try to achieve while in college. Now, let me tell you some hard-and-fast actions that you can undertake to advance in your career.
Do the course.
Commit your time and complete any course(s) of your interest. Do it for the sake of gaining knowledge and not merely the certificate. You should produce an output of the course that can be shared with the Internet - a blog or a code repo on GitHub. Make sure that people can see your work and your thought process while taking the course to add some real value to your profile.
Be a minipreneur.
Being an entrepreneur teaches you all the skills that you may ever need. However, it does not come easy. One needs to invest money, effort, and time and there's risk involved. Hence, become a minipreneur. Take a small problem and create a website around it. Learn marketing, budgeting, and people skills. Learn how to talk and sell to people. These skills are what will help you grow in your career, especially in later stages. You will learn to appreciate money, people, and how to get things done and on time.
Follow all sorts of people.
When someone asks you who is your hero in life, the answer has to be a celebrity, hasn't it? Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, and alike. To be honest, there is an extremely low chance that you are going to become a successful cricketer or actor, if you had, you wouldn't be here reading this newsletter. Follow people from different fields - startup founders, scientists, philanthropists, coders, sportsmen, politicians, etc. Get to know what work they do and how they think about it. A 360-degree knowledge of all these fields will help you make decisions in life and deal with different kinds of people.
Publish a research paper.
The best time to publish a research paper is when you are in college. You have ample time to work for it and the guidance of professors. Working on a research paper helps one get deep into a field, which often benefits when applying for higher studies. The work that you put in will develop your process of articulating thoughts, reading, and writing.
Contribute to open source.
The code that you write in college often comes from books or tutorials and it is not production-ready. Working on an open-source repository will teach you how to debug, and provide you practical knowledge of GitHub. Not only does this look good on your resume but also inculcates the value of teamwork in you.
To know more
The two newsletters, this one, and its previous issue are based on two videos that I published on my YouTube channel sometime back in 2019. You can find them here. And to not miss out on any newsletter issue, subscribe to tanaypratap's letters.
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