Reflections: My experience as a Computer Science undergrad
By: Surya Kukkapalli
Tags: Imposter Syndrome, Computer Science, College, Internships, Mindset Shift

Reflections: My experience as a Computer Science undergrad

This article presents my experience as a CS major, with the focus on my mindset rather than strictly career development, in the hopes that it can help others who can relate. Surya Kukkapalli Feb 25·7 min read

My name is Surya Kukkapalli, a senior studying Computer Science and Engineering in the Integrated Business and Engineering Honors Program (IBE) at THE Ohio State University. In two short months, I graduate. It’s almost as if life decided to throw me a surprise party, albeit one that I should’ve expected for a while now. After all, 3.5 years ago I eagerly began my college journey with this very goal in mind. Yet, if you told me I’d be working as a Software Engineer at Amazon in the Bay Area post-grad, I’d say you were crazy. Not because of the company or even location, but because of the job title.

Software Engineer. Why would a Computer Science major find this so strange? To fully understand, let’s step back a few years and walk though my experiences while highlighting my mindset at those times.

Before College

It’s senior year of high school, and I have no idea what I want to do. The advice “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” was difficult to take when you can’t make a career out of what you love (in my case, playing basement hockey with friends). My parents continually pushed me to find a passion by encouraging me to sign up for diverse classes or try to learn how to code on my own, but I just never found the motivation. Additionally, my circle of friends were all nothing short of geniuses. These are people who already had an internship experience, won a national award for scoring highly on a chemistry exam, or built their own apps. While I had leadership experience, I felt like I was worlds behind with little technical or tangible experience under my belt. But as application season came to a close and most of my friends decided to pursue computer science, I followed suit.

High school graduation (I’m in the front)! Before anyone asks, I’m kneeling — not that short :)

Whether it was because of the size of the perceived job market after graduation, the “excitement” of the tech industry, or even the money, I remember my decision could be summed up with “it seemed like what I should do”. Not what I wanted to do — simply because I didn’t even know what that was.

Entering College

When people say college is a “land of opportunity” and that you “get out what you put in”, they are 100% correct. Entering THE Ohio State, I quickly latched onto the Business side of my education, leveraging my involvement with IBE. I joined the Buckeye Undergraduate Consulting Club, competed in various case competitions, and even completed a consulting project in my second semester. Although I had signed up to be on the email list for a few CS-related orgs, I never committed to them as I did on the business side. If you asked me then what I wanted to do as a career, I would have told you consulting or PM. Why? I wasn’t passionate about CS. I was still doing it because I felt like I should.

My first case competition as a Freshman (SP 18)

Honestly, I believe that’s why I didn’t get an internship in my first college summer. It was a lack of concentrated effort on my part, and I got stressed. I felt I was falling behind my peers who were learning more about coding than I was, and getting great resume-building experience as well. Many people told me to not waste my summer, and “do a side project”. Unsurprisingly, the summer passed and there was no productive work done on my end. To me, it was incredibly daunting to approach the idea of a “side project” with as little CS experience as I had. Yet so many my age had stacked GitHub accounts already, or had enough knowledge to get started. Imposter syndrome started to kick into high gear.

Luckily, Josh and The Retrofit Source decided to take a chance with me for a part-time, remote internship during the following year. Josh has been one of my biggest mentors throughout college, and was instrumental in setting up my confidence going into recruitment season sophomore year. He sat on multi-hour calls walking me through some tasks that should have been easy for most interns. But his patience helped me learn, and allowed me to secure my sophomore year internship at JPMorgan Chase.

You hear some variant of the phrase “don’t be afraid to ask questions” a lot, but it wasn’t until then that I realized that asking questions is the number 1 tool against the imposter syndrome. Asking questions, no matter how stupid, allowed me to learn and build the self-confidence to progress and grow.

The Catalyst

My summer as a Software Engineering Intern at JPMC is what sparked a change in my mindset. As my first corporate internship experience, and with imposter syndrome plaguing my mind, I came equipped with the plan to ask questions and learn as much as I could. Yes, I wanted to write good software and get a return offer, but I saw that as a product of my ability to learn. As a part of the iOS team working on the Chase and JPMorgan apps, I would spend hours after work studying and building small POCs (proof of concepts) of my skills. I would then come to work with questions, and apply what I learned to our feature.

My team at JPMC (I’m on the far right)

While I didn’t realize it at the time, I was embodying the very idea of what I’m trying to get across in this article. Put so eloquently by Philip Wang in his graduation speech to UCSD in 2016:

“I didn’t chase my passion, I became passionate of what I chased”

After the summer, I continued to build small iOS apps. The key — I wasn’t doing it because I thought I should anymore. Instead, I found myself excited to sit down on a weekend and figure out how things like live object detection work (nerdy, I know) and build a small app to test it out. I finally felt a passion. I took that passion and brought it to the very next recruitment season with the goal to get a FAANG/big tech job in the Bay. I ended up signing with Amazon in Cupertino.

Return of the Imposter Syndrome

The work I did the following summer at Amazon was the most technical of anything I’ve ever done. Entering the summer, I was riding on the coattails of my confidence from my last professional experience. Now, I was on an AWS Networking team building a new routing protocol, and I had never felt imposter syndrome to that high of a degree.

Imposter syndrome in the kitchen? Due to COVID, WFH helped me become a better cook than this (eventually)

My team was full of networking pros, and I felt afraid to ask questions because they seemed so elementary. My project was so technically dense and complex, I had no idea how to even start. I had a huge fear of underdelivering, and would spend meetings furiously jotting down notes about what was being said so I could Google search all the terms later. Once again I felt behind; like I didn’t stack up or belong. This time, however, I thought back to my previous summer, and made my second realization:

The importance of committing — to yourself, to others, and to what you’re doing.

The Second Catalyst

At this point, I knew I was passionate about software engineering — I had earned one of my dream internships, after all. So I decided to commit. I fully entered “the grind”, dedicating countless hours after work to figure out what in the world I was building and how I could do so. I’m not going to lie and say I enjoyed it, it sucked at times (most of the time). But that’s where the importance of committing came in for me; I owed it to myself to see this through while putting in my full effort. I had committed to my mentor Mitch, to my manager Arti, to my team, and even to Amazon. To me, being reliable and seeing your commitments through is the mark of a strong character, so I did my best to embody that. Eventually, I ended the summer with one of the best presentations I’ve ever given, and took home the return offer.

Most importantly, however, I felt a surge of unbelievable confidence. I could talk about networks, link-state routing, AWS, and had even coded entirely in terminal (if you want to look and feel like a “real” computer scientist, try coding in terminal instead of a traditional IDE. only partially joking, it was difficult but made me feel like one of those movie hackers). I had, and still have, an unexpectedly high level of confidence and excitement in my voice whenever I talk about my project and what I built. The imposter syndrome was once again stomped. And boy, did that get me hopeful for the future.

The Future

The idea of moving out to the Bay to work as a Software Engineer at Amazon is a daunting one. For one, it’s the furthest I’ll ever be away from my home in Chicago. Two, I’m taking on the new environment on my own, with nearly all of my friends spreading across to Seattle, New York, DC, Texas, etc. Finally, I know that the technical challenges I’m going to face at work are going to be even larger than any I’ve faced so far. I’d be lying (and it’d be awfully cheesy) if I said my experiences empower me to no longer be afraid. I’ll admit it, I’m nervous! But I’m also looking forward to making this next commitment, and passionately chasing the next big challenge.