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Four Steps to Google, Without a DegreeSince publishing ABC: Always Be Coding - How to Land an Engineering Job, many have asked how I got an engineering job at Google without a college degree. Here’s my story, your mileage may vary.I had every intention of going to college. My college of choice was UCLA. Unfortunately, I had an embarrassingly low high school GPA (2.45) and so didn’t exactly have my pick of the university litter. Instead, I took computer science classes at Purdue Calumet, a satellite of Purdue University, with the intention of eventually transferring, or finding another way out. Nearly two semesters in, the latter happened in the form of an offer I couldn’t refuse.Step #1: Fake it ‘til you make it. While in college, I worked for a small company in Griffith, Indiana building websites for local businesses at $12/hour. The job wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I imagined my future career, but it could have been worse.I kept my head down, under-promised and over-delivered on several projects. This built a lot of credit. And the company made a hefty margin off of my hourly rate. Meanwhile, I was trying to create a game in my spare time, which I didn’t have much of. So, I went for a hail mary and asked management to give me three months to build my game on their dime and sell it online. I drew up fancy spreadsheets and colorful graphs showing them how the shareware model worked and how they were sure to turn a profit. I had little idea what I was doing yet somehow they bought into it, perhaps it was the pretty colors.Two months into development, I released a demo online. A fledgling startup in California called CodeFire took notice as they were essentially making the same damn game, a top-down space shooter, similar to SubSpace except in 3D. Unfortunately, they communicated this to me in the form of a cease-and-desist letter. There was only one response I could give, “Sure, I’ll stop — if you hire me to work on yours instead.” They replied with an offer. And so I picked up and went.Note: The company retained the rights to the original game. I gave three weeks notice and parted on good terms.Step #2: Befriend a master. This is the probably one of the most important things you can do. Find someone that is a master at your craft, make them your mentor, and never stop learning. While working at Double Helix that master was Nathan Hunt, one of the smartest and most humble guys I had ever met. And he was extremely patient with all of my questions no matter how elementary. I must have walked into his office thousands of times to ask random questions like, “how can I smoothly interpolate from one rotation matrix to another?” or “how should I implement moving capsule-to-cylinder collision detection?” Years later, he would join Google one month after me.Each of my mentors changed something about the way I approached problems or viewed the world. And there are only a small handful.Step #3: Fill in the gaps. Because I didn’t have a formal CS degree, I knew I lacked a lot of fundamental knowledge. For example, I implemented a physics engine but never solved a dynamic programming problem. To fill these gaps, I implemented nearly all of the most common data structures and algorithms that I heard or read about. The information you need is out there in spades, but there’s a chasm between knowing how something works by observing it, and knowing why something works by building it.Over time, do the following:Master at least one of C, C++, Objective-C, Java, PHP, Python or Ruby. Become fluent in at least one of the other languages and become familiar with Scala, Haskell or Lisp.Learn your data structures. Implement most of them. Understand their time complexities.Solve programming problems. Read this and solve many of these.Build your portfolio of (un)finished projects (e.g., programming frameworks, mobile or web apps, small games, and so on).Step #4: Find confidence. Six years after leaving Indiana, I had shipped about six games across multiple platforms. I was getting bored and needed a new challenge. I applied to Google and felt that if I were hired, I’d be a “real engineer,” something I struggled with since I didn’t have that coveted piece of paper. But, I never heard back and I wasn’t surprised.One year later, I resubmitted my resume. Except this time I took the “Education” section out of it altogether. Ironically, a recruiter called me and scheduled a technical phone-screen interview. I asked if we could schedule it for two weeks later and she agreed. I needed that time. I used it to cram as many algorithms and data structures into my head as humanly possible. I coded 12-14 hours a day and solved hundreds of problems. I was literally obsessed and wouldn’t stop until my fear of the Google interview turned into confidence and excitement.I remember every single one of my interviews at Google and had a blast with all of them. The interviewers were fun to talk to, and I believe they could see that I was excited to be there and welcomed their problems.Some of the problems given to me were:1) Given a set of 2-dimensional points, compute a skyline. This was easy. I drew upon a common data structure known as a max heap. There are several solutions, here is a good one.2) Design Microsoft Paint. This was by far the most fun problem. I started by drawing up interfaces and a class diagram. I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it. Luckily, I knew how to implement an iterative, breadth-first traversal with my eyes closed thanks to TopCoder.3) Describe your software virtues. This was an “open-ended” discussion interview. I talked about the types of testing and when they are valuable (e.g., unit, integration, acceptance). I talked about consistent style for maintainability of code. And so on. Things you would find in books like Code Complete or Effective Java.I was genuinely enjoying each round of interviews and solving the problems thrown at me. Had I not prepared the way I did, I am certain things would be very different. After the interviews, I had a very good feeling. But, I had heard even if the hiring committees agreed to move forward with an offer, that Larry himself would have to sign off on it. I feared that as soon as he saw my lack of education, I was toast.But that didn’t happen, and one day while I was eating sushi for lunch in Santa Clara, I got the call and enthusiastically accepted the offer. On that day, I knew for certain that I wasn’t ever going back to school.Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

IIT JEE, BITSAT and AIEEE scores do not determine how good someone is at research. Many students from VIT have got good admits in the past. But we'll get to that later.First, regarding VIT and MSLet's see what all aspects of a candidate's application are looked at:GRE and TOEFL scoresCGPAUndergrad college (VIT)LORsPublications (Research Experience)ProjectsInternshipsWork ExperienceSOPPoints 1 and 2 are independent of the college you attended for your bachelor's. Having said that, a 9.0 from IIT-Delhi would count for much more than a 9.0 from VIT. This brings us to Point 3.Undergrad college (VIT)Many people on Quora, some professors too, have said that they don't know of any colleges in India except IITs (mainly the 5 original ones).LORsTwo things:1. Many profs in VIT are not well-known in the US.2. To get a good LOR, you need to do research or a project under the prof. This is hard because the main focus of teachers in VIT seems to be on placements, probably because that is what the majority of the students here desire.PublicationsThose newspaper articles suggest that research does happen here. It is just that very few students take an active part in it. I'll talk about computer science research here. Not much research work happens here in 'hot' fields like Machine Learning, NLP or HCI. Most of the work is theoretical which doesn't seem to appeal to many students. Having said that, I know a few people in VIT who are doing really interesting projects and are currently writing papers about them.InternshipsWe don't get internships in likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo Labs etc. Some students do get internships in Microsoft Research, but this number is rather small (3 out of 550 for my batch).Work ExperienceI think this is quite independent of the college and I'm not sure how much your work experience affects admit. But I think working at a highly reputed company will increase chances. Work experience works like this:Suppose X wants to pursue his MS in machine learning.1. Ideally X would like to work in a company with a job profile related to machine learning.2. If not machine learning, X would want to work as a software developer since fields like machine learning also require coding.3. If X is working as a pharmaceutical salesman, it won't really help him during MS. Hence this work experience is useless.Computer Science placements are good here but one can't say the same for other branches. Many good students in other branches are not able to get jobs in their core companies. As a result, they have to join Accenture, CTS or Wipro. This means that they get a job outside of their MS field and this work experience doesn't help them.SOPSOP will benefit from good publications, projects, internships and work experience. It would have helped if students got more opportunities here.Secondly, do you really want to go to an Ivy-League University?Here is the list of top graduate schools for computer engineering.Computer EngineeringThere are only 3 Ivy-League universities in top 10 and only 6 in top 25.You see, for graduate schools, the university doesn't matter - the professors, the research work and the program matters. So I guess, the OP wanted to know about top grad schools instead of Ivy-League schools.Among the 2013 batch students, many people got into top universities. CMU(2), Purdue (more than 10), UCSD (2), Columbia (1), UCLA (1) are some of the admits. There are some others who have admits from top 25.I did a graph search on Facebook and found many people who did their B.Tech from VIT and MS/PhD from the likes of Stanford, UCB, CMU, UIUC, Cornell, UT Austin, JHU etc. See Are there any alumni from VIT admitted in any of the Ivy league university?To those people who don't get into top schools, and blame VIT for it: Many people from VIT have got admitted to top graduate schools in the US. If they can, why can't you? Don't blame the university.

Going into your junior year, it's time to get serious about your major. I'm going to step away from the all the job advice you've been getting and move into the University.Almost every major has its own divisional requirements. Since no university is specified, I went to look at Purdue's requirements for an EE/CS major, and am attaching them here. College of Engineering The commonest problem at graduation is missing a requirement, especially if you thought a particular course filled a requirement and later you find out you were wrong. Make sure your advisor approves and signs off on your plan of study.In the debate between Econ and more engineering courses, I don't have an opinion, but I do have information. A double major costs you electives, unless you plan to stay a fifth year. Do you want two majors more than you want to explore the many subsections of that marvelous word "Engineering," which seems to cover more every year: Avionics, computers, robotics, civil, electronic, and that new one I learned yesterday, mechatronics? Have you noticed how many people write in here saying, "I started majoring in EE, but now I want to add some physics..." flexibility now will cost you the double major, but will make it easier for you to get a job right out of college and solidify your plans for graduate education. If you're planning to work a year or two, you can take Econ courses after you graduate, in a classroom or online, depending on your job structure.If you're not sure you want to work in engineering, and want to take Econ because you're thinking of making finance your career, go with the double major, since that broadens the career options, especially should you choose to add an MBA after working a few years.Since you're only planning to work a year or two (rather than five or so) before returning to graduate school, I would advise you to look at GRE and GMAT now, especially the verbal sections. Last night I gave advice to a young man with a GRE Q165 V148. That's really going to limit him to a "math nerd forever" kind of career. I told him the higher his verbal GRE number, the better his future, and the same is true for you. Every STEM major needs to know that you MUST improve your English. You're going to have to write up your research, give presentations, and write grant proposals. Be eloquent! I have suggestions on improving your grammar, vocabulary and writing style here: Space PostWithout being too "credentials" focused, do be aware that you want to walk out that door with two academic recommendations on file. If there's a professor you get along with very well, try to take more than one class with that person. Try to make at least one a small seminar or a lab, instead of a 200-person Intro class, so the professor knows more about you than what grade you got. So much science work is done independently that you need recommendations that talk about self-motivation, discipline, and the sense to come and ask questions when you're stuck.To publish or not to publish? There seems to be a lot of publishing in the undergrad world in the STEM subjects, much more than there is in the liberal arts fields. We may not publish, but we do write. You should have a solid research paper, the equivalent of an honors thesis or independent study for the liberal arts degrees. Thirty to fifty pages seems to count as substantial work for the right-brained subjects; I assume the same length (at least twenty pages, maybe more) is necessary for the STEM folks. It definitely makes a difference at graduate school time, and your research advisor is usually your strongest recommendation.Finally, the year or two of work. If it's not meaningful, and reasonably close to the field you've chosen for graduate study, don't bother. A year of calibrating equipment and entering data into a computer so you can generate graphs not only won't help you, it could hurt you. Forward momentum is one of the key differences between a job and a career. When it starts to look like you have no advancement, others may start to get skeptical of your abilities.I hope this different approach to an answer helps you!