Communication skills are invaluable even for people in more technical fields. I myself have an electrical engineering degree and took quite a few CS classes. Most people want to assume that they can be brilliant in their own corner and not have to deal with people. However, when working in industry, you could have the best idea but if you are unable to present it well, it won't be heard and can be the equivalent of it not exisiting. Also for larger products, you will need to be able to work with other people well.

My suggestions are not specifically related to your field of study though. The things that I did included working in the computer lab at school which included the responsibility of helping other students with the computers and programming assignments, volunteering at a hospital, and working at a health insurance company in a customer service role over a summer break. Jobs or volunteering positions such as these that are directly customer facing and involve a lot of human interaction are great ways to force yourself into situations of dealing directly with people and can be great practice for learning how best to work with other people.

I would also suggest putting extra effort into team projects/assignments you are given in classes, focusing on the human aspect of working with the group as much as you focus on the intellectual work. An officer level membership in a club can be good because they you are typically involved in meeting other people to get them interested as well as the planning stages of activities etc. with other members.

I suppose this somewhat boils down to being more outgoing. It's not that you necessarily have to be outgoing but just able and willing to force yourself into situations of dealing with people and practice goes a long way in improving these skills.

Those guys all nailed it before me.
Communication: Written. Verbal. Interpersonal. Being a great communicator and sales person and leader/team member (even when you aren't the boss) are the real critical skills in every job. I was fortunate enough to take some interpersonal communications classes in college, and especially for us, um, "nerdy" folks, these sorts of classes can be invaluable.

Second to that is business. I'm not sure if a true MBA is necessary. But, having a solid grasp on the economics of business are critical. Your job depends on it.

Finally, nat's comments on project management are appropriate too. Whether its personal task management (Franklin planners or whatever) or true PMI skills, it's critical to be able to manage yourself and manage your projects.

Think about it. What matters at work? Sure, your skill as a coder. But, also, your ability to communicate your ideas as to how they affect the bottom line and how you will actually implement them.

Learn to type by touch - without looking at the keyboard. A reliable 60 words a minute or so.

No matter what skills you have, if you can't easily input information into the computer, you'll waste a *lot* of time and effort.

An email that might be two minutes to write at 60 words per minute, would be twelve minutes to write at 10 words per minute of hunt and peck typing.

Technical writing. You will be shocked at how useful it becomes especially when required to provide reports, updates, proposals etc for management or just other vendors etc... It is also a MUST if grad school is on the agenda at any time in the future. This was a fluke on my part but quickly become one of the big differentiators in my career.

First, "science or mathematics (or CS)" is too broad and is applicable to innumerable career choices. Allow me to put the focus on "the IT field."

I see a lot of "feel good," answers and a lot that seems out of left field. I mean, sure - if you want to be a programmer, than learn to program. If you want to be a chef, learn to cook.

Second, it isn't 70%, nor 80%, nor 90%, but 100% "who you know." Sure, I am spouting off a fallacious percentage and this is perhaps the biggest "career cliche," but this seems to be a hard lesson to digest. The truth is, you need to know enough to "talk the talk," and the rest is "who you know."

As far as "things to do in college to prepare for the real world," the most important thing is, network and try to find a mentor. This is the real "shortcut" to a great career. Talk to your family, friends, anyone. Ask them if they know anyone in the field that already does what you want to do one day. Befriend this person at all costs, and find other interests you share in order to find reasons to spend time with the person. Let them know how interested you are in the profession and, if you feel they are successful, begin "picking his/her brain" for advice. See if they can give you projects at home that mirror the type of work they are doing (for instance, he/she may give you an asp.net C# project to encourage you to make a basic database-driven site).

Get a part time job at a computer store / consulting agency, or best, a place that does both. See if your mentor knows a staffing agency or a friend that needs someone. You'll be surprised how bad people need employees that basically show up on time with a decent attitude and shave. Expect to make around $14 an hour.

Pay your dues in the back room, blow up a few customers' computers, and eventually you'll be "in the field" pulling cable and installing infrastructure and then troubleshooting business desktops and eventually servers / networks.
It is best to try to find a competent boss that will basically use you as eyes and ears as you put on your tie and mingle with lawyers, doctors, accountants, and other curious characters. Acting as the "face" will teach you core communication skills, and you will begin interacting with different cultures (as well as "business culture" in general) which will mirror your experiences in a global company later. At some point, one of these small businesses will let you know that they desperately need a new website, and try to take the opportunity to learn and do it for peanuts.

Regardless of whether you work part-time or full-time doing the stuff above, you will learn enough about computing to "talk the talk." It doesn't matter whether you wish to be a sys admin or a programmer - knowing the basics will make you more comfortable around professionals, and you will know what they're talking about (or at least the gist).

Do a great job at this job and keep your mentor in the loop. Always be on the lookout for additional friends in the business or mentors. Network constantly. Let everyone know you are interested in IT and give them the impression that you are an absolute whiz.

At this point, you will want to start looking for a real job. It is and has been difficult for a while to waltz into a serious "Full-time employee" job in IT. Most likely, you will need to leverage your experience working at the "small shop" to get in the door with some sort of staffing agency. My experience is that tech people are generally treated with a lot more respect than traditional staffing agencies, because the hourly rates are so much higher. Expect to BS your way into a job as a Jr. Sys Admin or Web Admin / Network Administrator / Jr. Programmer. Get a good resume. Get your highest ranking mentor to review it and modify it. It should read like you are a rock star. You'll probably make around $27 an hour at this point and probably work in a DEV or QA environment.

Get ready to discover that all of that college is about 1 second of a hiring manager's time, a mere glance. If it happens to be Ivy League, at least you'll have a springboard for discussion. And for all of you that say, "I joined MENSA so I could put it on my resume," seriously reconsider the value of your business skills and your self-monitoring abilities.


Don't freak out when you see the job descriptions for the jobs for which you are applying. Honestly, feel free to debate this, but typically the stuff you see on the "skills required" are basically the skills that you will have when you LEAVE the job.

The IT field moves so quickly that hiring managers rarely expect you to jump into a position and be useful. I would say they budget 6 months to a year of time where they basically expect you to be "useless." This means that during meetings for the first 6 months, no matter what you THINK you know, you don't know anything. You don't know the politics, and they matter far more than anything technical. My advice is shut the @#*#$ up unless you are spoken to or are making a joke. And, make lots of jokes, if you're good at it.

Anyway, get your contingency or first "real job" and be better than everyone. Spend every waking moment being great, but remain calm on the outside and never let anyone know you are cramming and crying when you get home at night to keep up. Just remain calm and be cool. Do your job well and when your manager asks you for anything, realize he wants high level answers, not details. ANSWER THE EFFIN QUESTION when they ask you a question; if they wanted to ask you about the details of your work, they'd ask.

You'll find that somewhere in your company or someone you know needs a Production or critical system administrator (or some other Production related position). Leverage your skills, be cool in the interview, and go be awesome. Honestly, Production and critical systems are "where it's at." At this point, you'll be making $40 - $50 an hour.

Keep being awesome and you'll end up just becoming an AVP or the like. People will be fired or quit all around you, but have some tenacity and become an SME. At some point, you'll look up and realize you are, by default, the leader of an environment (or 4) and are in charge of a team. Make the right friends and choices and you'll be a VP (or whatever) if the opportunity arises, and you can take your foot off the gas and start managing instead of killing yourself on the tech side. At this point you're making $150K. Good job man. That wasn't so bad, was it? Do whatever you want at this point. Become a director, consultant, open your own shop or website, whatever.

To emphasize, what people want is someone that can follow these simple rules:

Make money. Have fun. Don't piss people off.

Seriously, the rest will follow. Be calm. Be funny. Be punctual. Don't panic.

And don't pigeon-hole yourself. God, I don't know how many times I've heard IT guys saying, "Oh, I don't do Unix... I don't do networking... I don't do yada yada..." Good luck to those folks, as they rot away in cubicles in the basement.

Just be confident, meet the right people; luck will be a factor. But if you remember one thing, remember, "It's who you know."

PS - you won't even know the true definition of the word "peon" until you are making over $100K and realize that basically all business is politics, and the buddy system is more important than anything you know.

PSS - Get a Rowenta Steamer Pressure Iron. Required. Just because everyone around you is dressed like a slob doesn't mean that you can. I shop at the thrift store and Target, and I look as good as anyone at my company. Rowenta.

PSSS - Avoid naysayers and "noise" from people that are not successful at whatever you're attempting. Their advice is suspect.

You need to realize one thing first. You're trying to get a job, not become the world's best programmer. Why do I make this distinction? Because getting a job is all about people skills, not just technical skills.

I'm going to give you a few suggestions on how to become savvy in interpersonal skills. Then, after doing some of this stuff you may even get a better idea of what kind of job you want.

Go out to a bar alone. Force yourself to introduce yourself to a few people and try to have some conversation. Learn something new. I think you'll be surprised how hard that can be by itself if you're not used to such things. Buy a local bus ticket, same thing. Find someone on the bus to talk to about life, sports, or computer programming. Sit in a Starbucks with a paper, and force yourself to strike up a conversation.

After a little while, you will be a much more effective communicator than you would be from reading books on communication or working at home.

Communication is important, but I still vote for computer programming. Employers first question is always What can you do? Try to get some experience in the field that interests you the most, even as a volunteer: it is important on a CV.

As far as communication is concerned, you need to learn how to write for your audience. On any given day in the office, I need to email: my coworkers, the client, my boss, and upper management. It's entirely possible (and probable) that I will be emailing all four of those people about the exact same issue. But my four emails will be drastically different.

You need to learn in what cases to use technical terms and in which to use laymen's terms (and how to translate back and forth). You need to learn to what level of detail each email should go. You need to learn how to emphasize the parts of the issue that the given audience cares about the most. You need to learn which people to ask which questions to get the most important information.

As a general example, The Client has given us a requirement for a certain application. I can think of two different ways of implementing it, using two different technologies. I email my coworker asking which technology he thinks we should use, but I email the client asking which features/benefits are most important to them. It comes out to the same effect, but the way the question is worded and phrased is ridiculously more important than you might think.

You really need to separate yourself from everyone else in your field. Becoming more specialized is not the way to do it, it is really awful when you interview someone and all they can do is talk about on specific subject as if they lived in a vacuum for their entire education, please please, take some courses that would be unexpected to give you a broaderworld view, learna bout a different field that you are interested in, my old roommate did this and took art classes, because of his broader understanding of the visual world he was given a position at on of the top video game companies, just chose something you are interested in, be it music or on of the other soft sciences, psychology social sciences, something that would be out of your field, you will have a better perspective of how your niche could be applied to bigger areas, giving you the edge on all those computer geeks who are one trick ponies and can't think outside the box.

I think you should study computer programming. Programming requires mathematical and scientific skills. You can apply your skills in programming. For you, start with the basic. I recommend reading tutorials on visual basic or java perhaps. If you have any questions about programming, don't hesitate to ask me.

The easiest and cheapest way to improve your after-college skills is to volunteer for non-profits that interest you and earn leadership roles though volunteermanship. It doesn't necessarily need to be math oriented, but just something with lots of people and need for leadership like Habitat for Humanity, non-political campaigns (bond issues, etc), mentoring at risk youth, or teaching computer skills to a distinct group of people.

It's cheap, it's helpful to you and your community and it's free. Most importantly, it's the real world!

> wants upward mobility in their career

Read a pair of serious books about project management, then manage a project (free software, for an association, whatever...), and if you like it describe it in your resume.

best bet: join some teams. "Robot competition team" "physics olympics" or "autonomic vehicle" teams. Anything where there is a goal and other people to wrangle. That makes you responsible to do a job where other people depend on you, and you depend on them.

Good luck.

It honestly depends on what avenue you wish to take for your career. There is always a demand for cryptographers to help decipher and translate encrypted messages or message which are dated and written in a different language or code. Being able to work those problems out in a timely fashion is highly sought after. Essentially it would mean extra time studying number theory and scheme concepts. Knowledge of cryptographic algorithms is pertinent. With the technology age keys are getting more intricate and longer which means messages can be more tightly encrypted. So having a computer science background tied in with your mathematics background would make you a diamond in the rough and I imagine highly sought after by elite agencies.

Those answers are all spot-on.
But.
Your skills are irrelevant if you can't ace the interview.
Get on the financial sites and research the company.
When you go to that interview, you need to know more about the company than the interviewer you especially need to know what they are doing and what their plans for the future.

Also: Post this question next:
" How do I ace an interview for a job in the techninal field?"

my major is engineering, in math and electronics... instead of writing you tons of words, just let me know what field you are interested in working in and i will reply with exact course names and maybe locations