escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads

instead, here are a few high-level prompts that might help you escape flatland. (as usual, the law of equal and opposite advice applies.)

• try lots of things.
  
  build stuff. research stuff. go to random talks. go to random societies. look at stuff that piques your interest, even if it seems weird or sus or irrelevant or illegible or unprestigious or u

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rather than answering their question directly, I like to poke at what makes them feel they ‘should’ do the thing in the first place. what motivates you? why do you do what you do?

I’m always pleasantly surprised by how willing they are to engage with this. but more often than not, they say something like “of course you need to do X, that’s just ...... See more

for a given scene, you can think of these as mapping out a plane of legibility in the space of things you could do with your life. so long as your actions and goals stay within the plane, you’re legible to the people in your scene: you gain status and earn the respect of your peers. but step outside of the plane and you become illegible : the peopl... See more