It is easy to say you can figure out what you want to do with your life once you graduate. Education is costly and most of us can’t afford to enroll into a degree program and then figure out what we want later. It is better to know what you are getting into in advance.

Engineering is not yet another extension of school that you join first and then figure out. It will prove to be a ‘costly’ mistake for many. You intend to earn some livelihood using your skills for at least a few decades after graduation. And you also want to make sure you enjoy your work. Right? Then please spend a few months doing some groundwork before you sign up for a particular Engineering stream.

Mohammad Imtiaz is sharing 5 practical steps to find out whether you would enjoy a career in Computer Science or not.

1. Get a laptop (smartphones are too congested to work) and Internet connectivity and start exploring.

2. Start programming. Refer any online tutorial. Let’s say you picked Java. Write simple programs for a month. Understand the various constructs available in the programming language.

3. Grab any data structures and algorithms book with implementations in Java. You may find some decent and free ebooks, if you search. Watch plenty of YouTube videos to understand. Continue to code data structures & algorithms. Spend a month on this.

4. Gather the courage to build a small app. How about tic-tac-toe?

5. Will you be able to sacrifice the next IPL/football match/new year celebrations in order to finish the above implementation or fix some annoying bug? That shows your passion and level of commitment. It is an indicator of how far you will go in this field. Be prepared to miss some events in your early life of CS if you are serious about a career in it.

Computer science is not for everyone. It requires

• staring at the screen for long hours daily.
• sitting for long hours daily.
• applying Math, Data Structures & Algorithms and good coding/design practices.
• learning new things and/or applying your learning almost daily.
• debugging hard issues without much help.
• doing proof of concepts, turning them into real products, testing, documenting and maintaining and moving to new proof of concepts. You see the cycle?
• working under tight deadlines (now, you can forget IPL) under a not-so-nice boss/client/culture.

Follow Mohammad Imtiaz on Quora. He is a Computer Science Artist. So CSE students can definitely make use of his guidance.

Note : What are some great programming projects for beginners?