<p>I'm a junior in high school and I really want to major in Computer Science in college. But I'm really worried about extra curriculars that are related to the major. At the moment I'm teaching myself JavaScript, but I'm trying to find some kind of project to do over the summer to show experience before I apply. I'm considering pre college, but are there any suggestions as to what I can do? I'm also tryin to see if an internship would be a viable option, but I know it's difficult (even for local businesses) to get an internship as a high schooler. Please help!!</p>
<p>Making something yourself and having it be a part of your application can do as much for college apps as it does for personal learning / experience. A common one would be to make an app.</p>
<p>Personally, I had a fantasy football league website I coded myself (PHP with an SQL database integrated with HTML/CSS of course)and managed over 3 years (the leagues themselves were run by ESPN, I did not make an entire fantasy football interface).</p>
<p>Find something you want to do / need, and just do it yourself. While internships can be nice, I personally found I learned and gained more experience on my own, having done both. It does depend on the internship though.</p>
<p>Spending time with JavaScript will pay off in the future. Look into Node and jQuery. Especially jQuery is a fantastic library, if “raw” JS is too dry for you.</p>
<p>In CS in college you will likely first learn C++ and Java mostly, not javascript.</p>
<p>I don’t think it matters if you are doing JS now but will use Java/C++ in college. Learning new syntax is relatively trivial; it’s the programming and design concepts that matter, and those are cross-language.</p>
<p>Doing a project on your own, or contributing to a project is a good idea. You can actually start building your coding portfolio now. Make yourself a GitHub account and just go at it. Program whatever you want.</p>
<p>That said, colleges don’t necessarily expect that your high school ECs will be directly related to your major. People’s interests are so fluid at that age that it doesn’t really matter much. Also, they start from the beginning in all of these majors, so they are not just looking for people with lots of previous programming experience.</p>
<p>Depending on the schools you’re considering, sharpening your math skills could also be very useful. I found my math competition experience was significantly more helpful for my CS major than my programming experience. It really depends on the school and classes you take, but be aware that a CS major usually involves more math than you’d expect. Math competitions can be really fun too!</p>