Confused about how to proceed in life
I’m a college grad from IIT in CSE. I haven’t done any competitive coding or any proper coding during my college days for that matter. I have lost confidence in myself for some reason. I had taken up a business job but left it in a few months because I thought I could do better. I want to do competitive coding but as soon as I open my laptop, anxiety kicks in. I need guidance on how to proceed and what recourses should I use. I don’t want to waste my degree as I feel I can do better than my previous job.
Please help me on fighting my demons.
First of all, relax, it’s never too late and you can easily catch up within 4-6 months and be in a good position for applying.
If you are not clear on DSA, would recommend you to pick a course out of so many available on the internet and complete that first. If you did study in college, but don’t remember, brush up on the college notes or read about various topics from GFG.
Then for practise start by doing a list of questions topic wise. You can follow interview bit buckets or Leetcode150/Grind75/Blind 75 on Leetcode. This is to cover all the topics and give you some confidence.
Then start doing random Medium and Hard LC questions. This will be tough initially because deciphering what Algo or Data Structure to use takes time. Stick to it, if not able to think of a solution to a question within 15min, look at the answer. 100 questions or so should be enough more or less to get good control and confidence. You can practice more on topics you struggle with.
When you feel confident, start applying. Have patience throughout the process. All the best!
If you finished your graduation in CSE from IIT-D I assume you have basic coding skills and fair understanding of the algorithm taught in curriculum. You don’t have to go full steam into competitive programming if that doesn’t interest you.
You can pick a language which is somewhat in demand, learn that along with a framework if the language has one. Build some application, add those to github and on the side do some algo DS like lists array, sorting. This should give you the initial hang and once you are comfortable take to the next level
Which IIT?
Delhi
Which batch?