I know that computer science is an in-demand major, and although I am absolutely not set in stone about majoring in it, I am taking the intro course at my university and liking it so far. However, I detest my school’s location and as soon as I graduate I want to move back to either my home state or California. I noticed that the career fair at my school had mostly local companies (expected), but then there were the CS giants like Google, Facebook, etc.
I am not expecting to get the grades needed to get one of those internships/jobs, nor am I one of those who is always coding in their spare time, having side projects, etc. Basically my question is, with a CS degree how difficult is it to find internships/jobs outside of the area where your school has connections? What should I be doing to make that happen? Would I be better off transferring to a college which has connections to those locations?
For smaller non-local employers, you could do your own research to find them and their job openings and apply to them directly. For your home state, your friends or relatives there may be able to help.
At some larger companies, some people start working at one site, work there for a while, then relocate to a different site within the company.
The location of your college, in the end, won’t matter too much - if you move back and apply to many companies, you should get some interviews. Transferring for location alone would be a pretty big waste.
The bigger problem seems to be that you expect to not get high grades or do any work on CS outside of class. Many companies will look for the latter especially, combined with prior experience. So even if you have to intern locally, do it. Experience will be especially important to make you attractive to companies in your case.
It should be noted that companies generally don’t put much stock in grades at all. It’s a small indicator and bar you have to pass (3.0 or 3.5 usually) plus how much coursework you have done. After that, it’s much more about your technical skills and interview abilities.
Good luck!
A 3.5 GPA minimum would screen out a large percentage of college students. Even at the highly selective ones with the most grade inflation, close to half of the students would be screened out by a 3.5 GPA minimum.
So a company with a 3.5 GPA minimum is putting a lot of stock in grades for initial screening.
Agreed, I didn’t properly indicate the frequency of that. A 3.5 GPA minimum is very rare (in the range of a few percent), while the 3.0 GPA minimum is much more common and I would estimate makes up at the very least half of all intern position cutoffs.