What to do during summer?

[MisterWhite]

My first year of Informatics (first two years involve more math than programming, and other 2 are pure CS) studies is over and i'm not sure what to do during summer. I cannot think of any bigger project for the whole summer or something else productive as I do not want to let these 2 month just pass by.  The biggest 'project' i had to make was a game in SDL, it was a simple PvP platformer.
My first year studies consisted of:
C/C++

Calculus

Graph Theory

Discrete math

Data structures and algorithms.

 

 

[BestPCBuilder2017]

Have you thought about employment opportunities or are you too young for that 

[MisterWhite]

2 hours ago, NCIX Lampy said:

Have you thought about employment opportunities or are you too young for that 

Most job listings/internships require you to be a last year student and i'm not some kind of IT prodigy so that's most likely not happening.

[BestPCBuilder2017]

3 hours ago, MisterWhite said:

Most job listings/internships require you to be a last year student and i'm not some kind of IT prodigy so that's most likely not happening.

The game project sounds like a good idea then. It could give related to business experience down the road that employers would look for.

 

Just be sure you can bite off what you can chew. Some games have simple in mind, yet go pretty advanced in strange ways. 

[mathijs727]

Things I would do (but not really have the time for):

• Build a render engine with DX11/DX12/OpenGL/Vulkan
• Make a high performance (multithreaded SSE/AVX or GPU) path tracer
• Learn x86 assembly
• Learn Haskell
• Learn about neural networks (for computer vision)
• Play video games and watch Netflix

[kevindong0]

On 6/17/2017 at 8:11 AM, MisterWhite said:

Most job listings/internships require you to be a last year student

They really don't. I just wrapped up my sophomore year as a CS major and essentially all the CS majors I know get internships during the summer between their sophomore and junior year (including myself). Albeit, the summer between freshman and sophomore year is much more difficult to get an internship for. So, I'd suggest you try hard to get an internship for next summer. 

 

I don't know what exactly your program consists of, but at my university at least, the classes never, ever teach "practical" programming (i.e. programming for an actual job). They'll teach you a language or a concept. And they'll assign you projects to help you learn the language/concept, but they'll never tell you to make something actually useful/apply your newly found knowledge. That part of learning is entirely up to the student to do on their own. Since you know C/C++ and data structures/algorithms, you should know pretty much everything you need to know to make something that's of interest to you. 

[vorticalbox]

go find a project on github, clone it, improve it.