Computer Science Overview: Yuan Sun

Before entering college, I made up my mind to study engineering or a science major since I had an interest in mathematics and logic, and applying theory to solving real-world problems has always been rewarding to me.

I started my academic journey with an Electronical Engineering major, which involves a lot of computer fundamentals and circuits. The hardware part did not interest me much, so I changed my major to Statistics. I learned various statistical theories and a good amount of practice on running simulations and experiments. As I dug deeper into the practical side of Statistics, coding played more and more vital roles, I made another jump to major in Computer Science and it turned out to be a great fit. It has a perfect balance between theory and practice.

As I accomplished good scores in all courses at school and thought securing a job after graduation would be a natural and easy move. It turned out to be extremely hard to get an interview and for the few opportunities that I was given I failed all of them. I reflected on the process and started a study plan for job hunting. From resume, timed coding challenge, side projects, to behavioral questions, I worked very hard on every step in the hiring process.

I searched for some example resumes online and watched a few YouTube tutorial videos to write myself a good resume. Then I registered on some of the job-hunting platforms such as LinkedIn and Handshake, set up my professional profile, filter and apply for the intern and entry-level jobs. As I applied for companies, I kept track of the process including company names, interview stages and results on a Google sheet. The keys of getting an interview are improving your resume and applying for as many companies as you can.

The next stage is preparing for the interview. I set up a study plan to finish 200 Leet Code problems in the first round to cover all categories in data structures and algorithms. I also had a document to track every problem I solve and specially noted down the ones I think are interesting and challenging, so that in later rounds I can quickly go back to the document to refresh my memory. I also spent time practicing my oral English and communication for both technical problems and behavioral questions. After one year of hard work, submitting hundreds of applications, I finally got an internship offer and a few full-time offers after.

After the internship, I decided to join a tech startup company in Silicon Valley after graduating from college. I have been working as a backend engineer here for three years. I worked across multiple services including core product, payment, email and notification. On a daily basis, I work closely with product managers, front-end engineers and the AI team, designing scalable systems, writing robust code, testing and releasing product features.