Career Planning Resources for CS Students
Please refer to the Graduate School Information page for detailed information on the process of selecting and applying to graduate programs in CS. If you have any useful resources to add to this page, please email Professor Soni: soni at cs dot swat
Network
Join the Swarthmore College Computer Science LinkedIn group! Alumni are encouraged to post job and internship opportunities, as well as provide advice to current CS students about choosing a career or preparing for an interview. While there, be sure to also join the LinkedIn group Swatties Helping Swatties, a college alumni network hosted by Career Services.
Find CS alumni and where they landed through our CS department alumni directory as well as the (more complete) Swarthmore College alumni directory.
Job Postings
- Sign up for the CS department job-postings mailing list (only accessible from Swarthmore computers)
Swarthmore College's Career Services provides a range of resources to help you with almost every aspect of your internship/job/graduate school search. These include:
- Resume preparation
- Job search
- Interview preparation, including mock interviews
- Career counseling
- Graduate school information
- On-campus events
- Resources for Computer Science and IT jobs
Handshake provides postings for available jobs, fellowships, internships, on-campus interviews, information sessions, and career fairs.
UCAN is an internships-only database from select partner schools.
Career Profiles provides a narrative of several alums career path; search the listings to understand the diverse opportunities a career in computer science provides.
Events
Please see the department calendar below for events.
Resources
Here is a general list of helpful resources for the application process. Many of the books are available in the Career Service's Library. Note that the CS department does not endorse any of these resources in particular; rather, they have been helpful to past students in their job search.
- Computer Science Online - an in-depth guide to computer science degrees and careers written by leading experts. Includes information about degree programs, as well as various careers and their salary ranges.
- Resources for Computer Science and IT jobs, hosted by Career Services
- The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company, by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- Cracking the Coding Interview, by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- Glassdoor, an online resource for your job search
- Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, by John Mongan, Noah Kindler and Eric Gigue
- MastersInDataScience.org
- Changing the Curve: Women in Computing
A note about publishing code
Employers indicate that a great way to advertise your experience is to host projects on a repository-hosting server, such as GitHub or BitBucket. Then, you can provide your potential employers a link to your repository so they can see any work you would like to share. We encourage this activity. However, be sure you do not publicly share any course assignments - this is a violation of the department's academic integrity policy. Both GitHub and BitBucket allow free private repositories for anyone with a .edu email address.
For example, on GitHub, you can follow these instructions:
- Set up a GitHub account at github.com
- Request an Education Discount for 5 free private repositories (you can request more in the future) at https://education.github.com/
- Confirm your Education status and wait for approval.
- Create a new repository for a project you wish to upload. Be sure to set the visibility to "Private" if you are posting a lab assignment.
Things you can/should share include:
- Extracurricular projects (e.g., hackathon submissions)
- Self-guided course projects (e.g., CS 97 project)
- Lab assignments from courses in private mode with a shareable link
It is this last point you should be sure to check - if you upload a lab assignment from one of our courses, you must make the project private. You can still share the project with your potential employer through a unique link. But it must not be searchable to the public.
