IdiotsGuidetoPurdue
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[!NOTE]
Inspired by and partially rebutting this document written by Kart
This exists best as a compliment to Kart's work, I created this because I felt as though his guide was missing something. Not because I thought it lacked value.
Table of Contents
Just Do More
You've got to go to clubs, take graduate-level classes, do research, take all the hardest courses, and maintain a 4.0. Don't forget personal projects, you didn't forget personal projects, did you? If you don't have projects by the end of your first semester, you're already behind. In fact, you should've come in with a personal project and at least 20 AP credits. Plus, you've got to do a minor, and a second major, and if you haven't done a hackathon when they talk to you at the career fair, they will shoot you, they will take you out back, and they will shoot you because you're a lazy, good-for-nothing waste of space.
Jesus Christ. Stop.
Impostor syndrome in computer science is real. If you're not feeling it yet, read this and you will. Even good advice does little more than provide overwhelmed students with more things they "should" be doing. This is excacerbated by student's inability to do cost-benefit analysis, meaning they struggle to integrate advice. Because these guides provide few to no methods of actually freeing time (and students have few techniques to do so), most students read through a guide and are left with only the lingering anxiety that they either haven't done these things or can't possibly find the time to get around to them.
This guide will include things that you "should" do, but it largely focuses on meta-skills. These include how to learn and prioritize, the mindsets you should be approaching problems with, and more general life advice. Once you've read this guide, I hope that you'll be better able to integrate the advice you get from others.
Don't do more, make the things you're doing do more for you.
With that being said, welcome to
An Idiot's Guide to Purdue CS
Meta-Skills
Rather than telling you to do more extracurriculars or join more clubs, the point of this section is to teach you how to prioritize, manage time, and learn. These are meta-skills, the skills that help you learn other skills.
Keeping Up with the Joneses
One of the most common ways I see high-achievers waste time is Keeping Up with the Joneses. This is an idiom that refers to attempting to compete (or keep up with) the material wealth, class, or status of one's neighbors. In Purdue, it manifests as a desire to intellectually compete with those around you, to "win at Purdue" and prove yourself more intelligent, more talented, or more dedicated than your peers.
This is characterized by a desire to do things solely because you see other high-achievers doing them. A willingness to take on additional responsibility for the sole purpose of impressing your peers, or because it feels like that's what smart people do. If you read Kartavya's guide and then felt like you had to do many of the things he'd suggested, along with feeling like you were "falling behind," then you're Keeping up with the Joneses. In short, you're optimizing for impressiveness towards your peers.
The Purdue rat race will drive you to put effort into areas that your peers care about, most often GPA and course load. But the only way in which students at Purdue really compete is the job search. The overlap between impressing peers and impressing recruiters is quite large, but there are a few key differences. Recruiters often care less about GPA and more about your resume, interview skills, experience, and demonstrations of technical skill. Areas which recruiters obsess over, but your peers largely ignore, are areas where it's very easy to stand out. They can provide a huge benefit precisely because your peers don't seem to be doing them.
Most things at Purdue aren't a competition, and shouldn't be treated as such. Passion projects can be solely for passion, and attempting to copy someone else's passion project, even though you don't enjoy it, will quickly make you unhappy. Same goes for clubs, doing them out of interest is wonderful, doing them out of obligation is a bad idea. Rather than scattering yourself across a half dozen obligations, it's best to truly focus on a handful of fun passions.
If you're set on competing, then optimize for employability, don't maximize your ability to dunk on freshmen and scare classmates with your schedule.
Clarify Your Goals
To avoid keeping up with the Joneses, figure out some life goals beyond just "having people think I'm smart" or "fitting in". What do you want out of college? What do you want out of life?
Ultimately, your goal should be derived from the following:
Do things I will be glad to have done while in college.
It's up to you to define what that means. Will your future self be glad you were studious? Probably. Will they be glad you were so studious that you never made any friends? Probably not. Find a balance.
Figuring out what you want out of life is difficult. If I had to give you a one-paragraph answer to the secret of happiness, it would be to love the process, not the product. Doing things makes you happy; having things tends not to (unless having those things allows you to do things). Having friends will make you happy; having a big house won't, unless you use that house to host friends.
Don't ignore money, money lets you do things that'll make you happy, but don't let it get in the way of your happiness either.
Once you've thought about your broad life goals, try to break them into chunks. To me, things that I'll be glad to have done in college are:
- Set myself up for a good future.
- Enjoy my time at college.
I can break those goals down even further. The first goal can be broken down into:
- Figure out which domains of CS I most enjoy.
- Learn skills that'll help me in my future jobs.
- Find a good job.
- Make lifelong friends
- Grow as a person
Keep breaking these goals down until you've got small, achievable goals that you can make concrete progress towards. It's best if these goals are somewhat short-term and have clear failure/success states.
Constantly considering the lifelong impacts of having a bagel for breakfast will drive you crazy. The simple fact of life is that most of our decisions have to be on autopilot, gut choices, or we'll go insane. Do try to put serious thought into big decisions, but don't sweat the small stuff, and don't feel pressured to exhaustively schedule everything. The most important outcome of this strategy is improving your gut sense of how important something is.
At the beginning of the week, try to have a general sense of what you've got to do and how you'll spend your time. At the end of the week, review how you spent your time, how useful that time was to achieving your goals, and how useful your smaller goals were towards their larger parent goals. Yes, actually set aside time to do this; I recommend an hour a week.
Reflection provides feedback to make your time management better. Most people only get feedback on their time management when they fail. But this also means that the vast majority of people are trapped with mediocre schedules that work, but don't work well. The only way to get better at something is feedback, and our goals provide much more specific and useful feedback than, say, a panic attack at 5 AM because you've got a midterm at 9:30 and you haven't slept in two days.
When reviewing your week, think through your actions. Ask yourself if there was a faster way to get the same result, or if there was a way to get a better result in the same amount of time. What could you have done if you'd spent the time you'd used doing X on Y instead? Would you prefer to live in that universe? Knowing what you know now, what would the ideal super-schedule for last week be?
Make sure your goals are still relevant. Both your goals and their priorities will shift constantly; check in regularly t
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Audited on Mar 29, 2026