Finding Balance Between Software Engineering School And Professional Work

I’m currently on track to graduate McGill University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Software Engineering at the end of 2021 — if things go according to plan… Come December 2021, I’ll also celebrate 1.5 years of working in the software development industry at SSENSE. Yes. I will have had over a year and a half of professional experience by the time I finish school.

During the last two SSENSE internship recruiting seasons, my colleagues and I had the chance to meet dozens of tech students from multiple universities on behalf of SSENSE. From those discussions, I noticed that more people than I expected find themselves in a situation where they do not have time to spend on extracurricular activities or professional work. In fact, when I talk about my experience working part-time as a software developer at SSENSE while being a full-time student, I often get asked the same questions:

• “How do you manage school and work at the same time?”
• “Is this something you would recommend, in general?”

I wish the answer to the first question was as easy as “get yourself some good friends and good team members” 😉. But, you all know that it is, unfortunately, not that easy. This article is my attempt to answer those questions and hopefully lend some insight to students like me who are thinking about combining their software development studies with work.

The curse of academic perfection

As tech students, we have all heard that our grades are far from being the most important factors when it comes to finding a job in the tech industry. In fact, there are many ways nowadays to stand out from the mass of applications which are far more valuable than a 4.0 GPA — such as participation in hackathons, personal projects, involvement in clubs or design teams, amongst others.

However — and don’t get me wrong here — I am not saying that grades are worthless in the application process. In fact, my experience working with recruiters taught me that grades are good for indicating things such as time management, adaptiveness, determination, etc. That being said, one’s GPA is a simple variable in a multivariate analysis.

Tech students still put a lot of pressure on themselves, pursuing their quest for the 4.0, the holy grail in college. This pressure is what I affectionately call the “curse of academic perfection”. This curse is usually what prevents students from working on more practical projects to put into application what was theoretically learnt in class.

Managing school and work concurrently

Let me reassure you straight off the bat, my secret is not to stop studying or attending classes. In fact, like everything in life, the goal here is to strike a balance between work and studies. This seems to be the challenging, and somewhat confusing part, when I converse with students who ask me the aforementioned questions. So, for you tech students, I will try to give you a cartesian explanation of what it is to strike this balance, all from my humble opinion.

To illustrate my point, here is a very simplistic graph that represents a student’s grade as a function of effort measured in time. Obviously, the curve does not exactly represent what happens in reality, but it is a good enough approximation, especially towards the flatter part of the curve.

As a student, I started university like many others, with the aim of arriving at the end of this blue line, where the grade approaches 100%. This was how I was raised and how I always behaved in school. However, when it got time to apply for my first internship, I started realizing that perhaps my method could use some improvement due to a lack of extracurriculars on my resume. This is when I considered cutting a certain amount of time spent in school-related work and reinvesting that time in extracurricular activities that I felt passionate about. The result? No substantial impact on my grades and a lot of spare time for personal projects, thanks to the beautiful behavior of a logarithmic curve.

Essentially, what I am trying to say is that I am far from being a superhero. I like to wake up late, I procrastinate, I like to go out with friends, and I sleep an average of 7–8 hours every night. The only thing that I do differently is analyze the time I spend in school-related work and make sure I have enough time left to invest in my professional career and/or exciting projects I want to take part in. This is my secret for managing full-time studies and part-time work at SSENSE.

Do I recommend working and studying at the same time ?

At this point in the article, I believe I made it clear that working and studying at the same time is something that I highly value and recommend. Now, stopping here would be a very unsatisfying answer to a great question, so let’s further develop the reasons why I highly recommend working part-time or getting involved in a tech project.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that universities have a hard time coping with the fast-paced world of technology. What do I mean by that? I mean that it is very hard (maybe even impossible) for universities to revamp their programs and introduce new and exciting technologies every few years. It takes time to build a solid curriculum, which means that current ones are usually built on top of older practices and technologies. Do you see where I’m going with this? Working part-time in a startup, on a personal project or in a design team can bring this complement of information. On one side, you get to learn the basics and the theory behind it, and on the other, you get to put it in practice with state-of-the-art technologies.

A good example for this is the use of programmers’ best friend: Git. Who really used Git in a close-to-optimal way in the context of a school project? I, like many students, was told about Git and was asked to use it in a team without really knowing what I was doing. The result? A funny looking mess of branches, dozens of merge conflicts, commit messages that make no sense, and on top of it all, every commit being pushed to the master/main branch directly. However, when thrown into a real team of developers in a professional context, the outcome is totally different. There are guidelines that need to be followed and best practices that are highly suggested. This really is where I learned how to take full advantage of Git’s immense potential when collaborating with other developers on the same project.

Git is a singular example amongst many others. For instance, I really grasped what a backend was when I had to work on a particularly complex one at SSENSE, with the help of a developer with over 15 years of experience in backend development. I also only understood the genius behind relational databases when I had to query one with dozens of tables and millions of rows. I can keep going, the list goes on forever. The important thing to remember is that, in a professional setting, projects are much larger and some coworkers are more often than not extremely experienced, which undoubtedly leads to better chances of consolidating what was taught in class.

As obvious as it sounds, working within a professional context gives you hands-on experience. This experience allows you to enter the workplace well-prepared. In fact, many students that worked part-time already signed a real permanent offer by the time they graduate. Moreover, the experience you gain is not only technical; working on a real project finetunes teamwork related skills like communication, code reviews, brainstorming, etc. It also gives a good idea of what kind of job you might like or dislike, which helps you aim for the right company and job title once you graduate.

Conclusion

I will not lie to you, mixing studies and part-time work can be challenging, especially on the time-management side. However, striking a balance between work and school takes away a big chunk of the challenge. As I detailed above, cutting some time spent in school work and reinvesting it in professional work or projects can be very beneficial for your future career. It provides you new learning opportunities and gives you a fair amount of real-world work experience.

I am hopeful that some of you can slowly make this transition, as it made my time in university a lot more enjoyable and insightful. Until then, as a fellow student, I wish you the best of luck in your future semesters and I wish you a career that surpasses your expectations.

Editorial reviews by Deanna Chow, Liela Touré, and Pablo Martinez. Want to work with us? Click here to see all open positions at SSENSE!