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Coding Your Future: A Guidebook for Students

15 Organising your future

You might find it a bit scary thinking about your future. You might be tempted to procrastinate making important decisions about your future, see figure 15.1. There is a risk of thrashing or getting stuck in a do-nothing or busy waiting loop. This guidebook is here to help you break out of that loop. One way to breakout of an unproductive loop is to organise and schedule some time every week where you work on personal development and job applications. Doing good applications takes time and you’ll probably find you can’t do as many applications as you might like, especially when you consider Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

The biggest waste of time is the time spent not getting started on a project. Your future might seem big and unknown but it’s really not as scary as you might think and getting started can be surprisingly enjoyable. New Project? Every time… by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

Figure 15.1: The biggest waste of time is the time spent not getting started on a project. Your future might seem big and unknown but it’s really not as scary as you might think and getting started can be surprisingly enjoyable. New Project? Every time… by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

Your future is bright, your future needs organising, so let’s start organising your future.

15.1 Building your future

In section 11.2.10 and 11.2.10 we discussed the importance of timing in your job search. When you apply for jobs will determine what kind of jobs are available because most graduate schemes and graduate jobs follow a rhythmic recruitment cycle of some kind. How many jobs you apply for is largely a function of how much time you spend doing it. The more time you spend, the more applications you can do.

We haven’t explicitly discussed the timing and organisation of the activities outlined in the preceding chapters:

  1. Designing your Future in chapters 1 to 7
  2. Testing your Future in chapters 8 to 13

Let’s imagine you could precisely specify all of the tests using make in a makefile or specify them somehow in your favourite Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Ideally, you’d like to automatically run these tests, so that you can build your future systematically. You’d like to repeat these tests periodically, e.g. once a day, week, month or whatever your schedule is, similar to build automation in software engineering. Attempts to automate aspects of job applications and interviews have so far had very mixed results. (Schellmann 2022; Dastin 2018) But, as another thought experiment, let’s image it was possible

15.2 Breakpoints

Let’s pause here. Insert a breakpoint in your code and slowly step through it so we can examine the current values of your variables and parameters.

* PAUSE ⏸️
  • So what’s in your make file?
  • How often will you run it?
  • Which tasks can you automate?
  • Which tasks are always going to be manual?
* RESUME ▶️

15.3 Scheduling your future

If you’re a University of Manchester student, the live Coding your Future (COMP2CARS) workshops sessions are also here to help, every Tuesday at 4pm. COMP2CARS complements the second year tutorials (COMP2TUT) at the University of Manchester and takes place in the same slot as COMP2TUT when you meet your personal tutor. See your timetable at timetables.manchester.ac.uk. The outline is:

  • Weeks 1 and 2: COMP2TUT, meet with personal tutor
  • Weeks 3 to 6: Seminars in Lecture Theatre A, engineering building
  • Week 7: Reading week - take a breather
  • Weeks 8 to 10: Seminars in Lecture Theatre A, engineering building
  • Weeks 11 & 12: COMP2TUT, meet with personal tutor

Outside of that, its a good idea to organise some scheduled time to work on continuous professional development (CPD), particularly the not very scary and actually quite enjoyable tasks of designing, building, testing, deploying and coding your future.

15.4 Week 0: Experiencing

Welcome week, starting 18th September:

Thanks to our panellists for answering questions via mentimeter Ask Me Anything (A.M.A.) from the audience about their placements and their transition from students to professionals.

There is more information on Experiencing Your Future chapter 5 and student case studies of employment in chapter 21 on Hearing your Future: the Coding Your Future podcast.

15.5 Week 1: Debugging

Tuesday 26th September at 4pm: Depending on your when you meet your tutor

15.6 Week 2: Debugging

Tuesday 3rd October at 4pm: Depending on your when you meet your tutor

  • Either COMP2TUT: Meet your tutor (if you didn’t meet them last week) see digital.cs.manchester.ac.uk/student-groups
  • Either COMP2CARS: Debug your CV (self assessment) using section 8.9. Read Debugging your future (chapter 8) and Hacking your future (chapter 9)

15.7 Week 3: Hacking, 10th October

  • Hacking, debugging and questioning your future, activities and questions based around chapters, 9, 8 and 14

15.8 Week 4: Finding, 17th October

  • Finding your future, see chapter 11

15.9 Week 5: Knowing, 24th October

  • Exploring your future, see chapter 2

15.10 Week 6: Resting, 31st October

  • Take a breather, its reading week.

15.11 Week 7: Writing, 7th November

  • Writing your future, , see chapter 4

15.12 Week 8: Writing, 14th November

  • Writing your future, part 2 of 2, see chapter 4