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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   3349 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

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What should I include in a CV for a software engineering internship? I'm a PhD student in pure math with little relevant work experience. Some highlights:

-Teaching (including some CS-relevant classes like linear algebra and discrete math).

-Coauthorship on several publications.

-A little programming work towards one of said publications in C and Sage, some more in C for master's thesis, a bit in Python for the current dissertation.

-Project Euler, mainly in Python with occasional pen-and-paper (285 solved currently. Almost caught up to our nybbler. Not much low-hanging fruit left.)

-Grades: mediocre undergrad in an irrelevant subject. Graduate coursework is all math and much cleaner.

-Teaching and academic awards.

What libraries/frameworks are you familiar (very very good) with? "Some C" and "Some python" is vague.

Your math/research background would be largely wasted (on paper) if you go into a generic software engineering role. Consider some kind of relatively math/stats-heavy programming-based field like Data Science or quantitative finance? A lot of math PhDs getting into those.

There are no such libraries. I've rarely used libraries besides math and itertools for Project Euler; it's more fun to write things from scratch. This is why I'm applying for internships rather than full-time positions.

I'm completely fine with the math background being wasted. If I were healthier, I'd have probably dropped out in favor of some kind of physical work when Covid first hit. I'd prefer not to relocate or work remotely, and there are only a few plausible employers other than the university within driving distance.

it's more fun to write things from scratch

All fun and games until it isn't.

I don't mean to be insulting, but this is a very naive sentiment to hold. Real-world software (ones that people use) can use more than 20 different libraries, all of which are wildly different in functionality and are difficult to implement for people working in that specific field, forget people not in that field.

You are not going to write a web API, a database or a transformer model from scratch. But you can write software that interfaces with libraries/APIs that allows you to use 3 of those things in the same codebase, in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm completely fine with the math background being wasted.

How bad is your health?

Generic software engineering is boring. Way more boring for someone who got a math Ph.D., than you can imagine, it's grunt work most of the time. The math equivalent to being made to solve quadratic equations and do algebra all day, just 100s of problems of them.

No offense taken. I took up Project Euler two years ago, when grad school felt unbearable between some personal issues, Covid fanaticism, Zoom-based teaching, and figuring out that I wasn't good enough for number theory. (The last was always a possibility, it was just an extra layer of suck on top of the others). So I optimized for enjoyment. In fairness, the PhD program was for enjoyment to begin with - I'd gone into the master's with the goal of teaching community college and ended up liking pure math way too much. Now it's time to grow up.

Screwed lower back and pretty much all arm/hand joints. Chronic pain, now mostly manageable with NSAIDs and very light barbell squats.

Tedious work toward (hopefully) a useful goal for a non-woke employer will be a massive quality of life improvement.

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