Bro I’m in final year and literally know NOTHING, am I doomed? 😭

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If you got through 3 years of university without flunking out, you can't be doing that badly. If you want projects to look at, try GitHub. Only has a few million of them.

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Basically like a one-stop place to learn + build + get guidance. Does that even exist

It does exist and you just spent three years there.

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I don't know about the industry specifically, but learning and applying the knowledge takes a certain number of work hours. This is good advice to start putting in hours. OP is asking if there are shortcuts. You can optimise to get the most out of your time, but there's really no way around having to put in the hours. His fate will depend on what assessment/sign-off involves and how soon it will be.

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projecteuler.net

do them in order. in whatever language you want to learn. shiiiit back in “the day” it was how I learned ruby.

but the probs are not gamified like “hacker” coding questions they are, in my 30+ years exp as an eng, more realistically like real world plain english specs/asks from customers.

trust me. i’m a guy on the internet. do it. you got this and know more than you think.

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Just accept ur fate and smoke weed about it

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Internships and entry level jobs are where you learn those things.

Don’t worry about it too much, but if you can find an internship that will be your best bet.

My advice is network to find that internship, and if you can’t that okay too. Employers don’t expect you to know everything, it’s why junior levels exist.

Don’t buy projects, but maybe look into open source software you use, they’ll use tons of different design patterns and architectures. If you can contribute to some while learning that’s even better.

Devs do not consider you opening a pull request and asking them for help getting it across the finish line a waste of time. Find a beginner tagged issue and run with it.

Just don’t try pushing a bunch of AI code and mention in your PR comment if/how/what AI you used so you don’t waste their time or violate their policies.

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seriously. i struggled early, and have zero college. but mentor now the folks just out of college in our corp. I’m 46. They are nervous with new robotics degrees trying to tell me about ROS2 and I’m like … no, here’s how modbus works. Get at it. Tinker. Break stuff. Learn. it’s ok!

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Getting a job might suck for a while depending on where you are, but once your foot is in the door and you start getting real world experience, you will be fine.

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Assuming it's programming because why else would OP randomly say they dont know it...

Which is terrible because that's a practical skill you can't really fake and you need the foundational knowledge from school.

OP is gonna need to look at something like HR or office drone where a general degree is "good enough".

Not the end of the world, they just coasted thru a degree for a very competitive field. So now they need to pivot. Even people who paid attention and know their shit can't get a job programming these days anyways

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People like you are the best kind of mentors, imho

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Any advice would be a lifesaver ---

Stop wasting your time would be my first advice.

If you really feel like you've wasted your time for the first 3 years, change. Change now. Not tomorrow, not next year, not after you manage to find the real 'good place that will help you learn something'. Do it now, where you are. Start learning, ask questions, discuss with teachers (and fellow students, too), invest yourself.

It's never too late, no matter how late. But there is no shortcut to doing the work.

Basically like a one-stop place to learn + build + get guidance. Does that even exist or am I just daydreaming here?

Like already mentioned, that's the place you're in right now. But, allow me to insist on that, it requires you to put in the work. Like with learning anything new.

The other suggestion I wanted to make was already given to you: since you seem to be into coding, start actually coding stuff. A diploma is not worth much compared to experience you acquire by making stuff and writing you own code for real.

There are plenty open source projects looking for someone to help push them forward if you have no idea on what to work. But if that's the case I would also suggest you question your motivation to study that.

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Graduated from college in 2005. I still feel that way.

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I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You're at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.

Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven't heard of anyone coming into a role who's expected to know everything, so I wouldn't worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I'll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I'd done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I'd have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven't found anything.

And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I've only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it's stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you're on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.

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If you survived university this long, you must either be really good at cheating or you have imposter syndrome. My now Ex-wife graduated in a medical field 10 years ago, and the first year of her job she thought that she doesn't know enough. Then she realized how the others around her worked, and came to the conclusion that she had enough knowledge to use her critical thinking and to know where to look something up if she didn't know it. In the working world, noone has an issue with you looking something up you don't know by heart.

Also, i can only mirror what others here said - get on Github and find a project that interests you, or try modding a game you really like; It doesn't only mean you get practice, but also gives you the self assurance you are currently lacking.

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You'll learn more on the job than you did at uni, I sometimes have small projects that I hire out, you can reach out to me and try out a paid contract job with low pressure. I've helped a few other people through the same process but no promises.

The industry is moving very quickly, honestly don't stress too much about the nitty gritty details like syntax and such, probably a safe bet to focus on the practical side instead of the deeply technical side.

Every interview that I've given and taken has been more about personality and compatibility than skill.

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There’s always McDonalds.

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Find an open source project that's coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit -- or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

Download a working copy, then, since you're learning with this, pretend the repo doesn't exist anymore and you're on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the "solution" code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it's actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it's going to? Try using it.

If it works, make sure you understand why.

If it doesn't, try to figure out why not.

Keep going until you have a working new feature.

Then try a more complicated feature.

After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.

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That's my favorite thing about switching jobs - low expectations!

However, I don't like how the training these days is usually "read through some old tickets, you'll figure it out, see you in a few days!"

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Lots of advice here but I haven’t seen anyone mention coding boot camps. There are free ones like FreeCodeCamp or lots of paid options. You can do these to learn or validate what you have been taught.

My company hires associate-level software engineers directly out of college programs and boot camps. They don’t expect people from these to know everything; you may not have ever even used the language that you will be expected to code in! But by completing a program you’re showing you understand the logic of programming and that is applicable knowledge.

Look for entry-level jobs and you’ll be fine. Even better, look for companies that intentionally hire from programs like yours. They’re more likely to have internal programs to help teach new-to-career folks.

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"Gifted" but not quite genius kid here. I managed to coast through the first year of University, but then I hit a wall, where discipline and good study habits would have served me well.

Eeexcept I'd never needed to do that before and I had undiagnosed but pretty blatant and crippling ADHD which meant that I couldn't do that even if I tried. (I occasionally did try. No dice.)

Repeated the second year. Barely scraped through it. The decline continued. The final year I was just showing up because that's all I knew how to do and was too scared to up and quit.

Spent most of my time in the computer labs interacting on the early WWW. It was an excellent distraction from the absolute stress I was under.

Didn't graduate, but heard you could get a diploma for having passed the first two years. Requested and got that. No ceremony. No fanfare. It's in a picture frame in a pile of stuff somewhere around here. Too many painful memories to display it on a wall. I still have nightmares.

What I did do was go out and get a job. This was pre- turn-of-the-century so getting a job was way easier than it is now, but it still took six months. Ended up working for what is now a fairly big US-based company that shall remain nameless. (I was ousted long before they made it big.)

My advice would be to do similarly. If you don't think you can knuckle down and do what you need to in order to pass this course, get out now, or else at the end of the school year when there's a natural end to things.

BUT: Do at least try to knuckle down first. Lots of other good advice here. Maybe you're not in as bad a state as I was. Maybe you do in fact "got this". Getting and doing a job is different, but it's not necessarily easier. (But for me that's another story.)

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Bro I’m in final year and literally know NOTHING, am I doomed? 😭