How I Got Here
I have been meaning to write this for a long long time. I never got around to it because of lack of motivation though. Last week I was asked to speak at a session at LUMS on applying to grad schools and other university advice. It was after I had repeated what I had done to get to this point multiple times that I realized that it would be vastly more helpful to people if I actually wrote this down.
A shoutout to my brother, Shahmir Kazi, who put in the effort and time to plan most of this. Apart from being a great mentor, he made me meet CS seniors for CS related advice. He pushed me when my motivation was low, and has been the ideal example of an older brother being useful to his siblings.
Cue in a rambling story of my last two years at LUMS.
See my other post for what path I feel LUMS CS undergrads should follow.
A rough timeline of events
Fall 2015 - Sophomore year.
I was advised to take Intro to AI a year earlier as it was considered an easy course and it would lessen the load fom my Junior year Fall semester.
In a few words, it went terribly. I was in way above my head and it made me question if I could really program or not.
Spring 2016 - Sophomore year.
I took CS300 (Advanced Programming), even after the troubles with AI the previous semester. As it turned out, AP was to be one of the best courses I took in LUMS. I learnt more during this course than any other, and I have never been more focussed during any other class. Not sure which one was the cause and which one was the result.
It was during this semester that I approached Dr. Junaid Haroon Siddiqui for some general course advice and to ask if he had work for me during the summer. He directed me to Dr. Fareed Zaffar who told me to study the NetCentric Computing course until the end of semester.
Summer 2016
I started working with Dr. Fareed Zaffar on different research projects. The fact that I had not taken Networks formally and the only useful skills I had were from Advanced Programming, affected the type of work I was able to do in each project. In retrospective, this was easily one of the most productive summers I have spent (iftaari at PDC was extremely bad however).
This was also the time when I worked on Typosquatting, the project which was to later get published in Infocom 2018 [link to paper]. I also was the Teaching Assistant for CS300 in the Summer semester.
Fall 2016 - Junior year.
Having seen what kind of work I had done, Dr. Fareed and Dr. Junaid advised me to start preparing for technical interviews at top industry companies. Dr. Fareed especially got multiple mock interviews scheduled and asked many of his friends to put in a referral for me in the companies (take a look at my side post on how referrals work at top tech companies). I applied, and got rejected from multiple places, including Microsoft and Facebook.
Spring 2017 - Junior year.
I prepared for the interviews more and more. My courses suffered, but then again the courses weren't that great to begin with. I took part in multiple programming competitions (teaming up with Khadija Tariq and Basit-us-salam Khan). We won the PU and FC College programming competitions.
I was the TA for CS300 again this semester. Along with this and the multiple mock interviews and programming competitions, I felt somewhat prepared for the technical interviews. I got a online test from Google Japan and finished that within time. In the meantime, they somehow got another application from me. I got a second online test, and even though I finished that too, I was rejected on that stage. I emailed the recruiter to ask what was happening and why I had gotten two tests. In a huge stroke of luck, I found that there had been a mess up on their part and my first application was onto the next stage; the actual technical interviews.
I left everything and prepared for the technical interviews at this point. There were two rounds of technical interviews over phone/video call. The day before my second interview, I gave four mock interviews. At the end I was accepted for a summer internship at Google Japan for 2017. After a quick team matching phase, I was placed into the Geo (Google Maps) Local Discovery team.
Summer 2017 - Google Internship.
My first time out of Pakistan. My first time working at a company. My first time being a Noogler.
Fall 2017 - Senior year.
I got a job offer from Google Japan around December 2017. I will be joining the Tokyo office in August 2018.