Ladies and gentleman of the College of Engineering:  Study Comp. Sci.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future
Computer Science would be it.

The long term benefits of Computer Science have been proven by
Mathematicians.  Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more
reliable than my own meandering class experiences.

I will formulate this advice now:

Enjoy the power and beauty of Discrete Structures
Never Mind
You will not understand the power and beauty of Discrete until after you
fail the course several times.

But trust me, 20 credits from now, you will look at proofs you did and
recall in a way you can't grasp now how induction really works, and how
easy that class was.

You are not as logical as you think.

Don't worry about future job security.
Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to code
quicksort in Visual Basic.

The real troubles in your schedule are actually things that never
crossed your degree audit.  The kind that delays graduation by an idle
semester.

Code one thing everyday that is processor intensive.

Don't be reckless with other people's CPU's.
Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Debug

Don't waste your time on flow charts.
Sometimes your program compiles, sometimes it doesn't.
The code is long, and in the end, it's all yours.

Remember the good grades you receive
Forget the bad ones.
If you succeed in doing this: tell me how.

Keep your old functions.
Throw away your old printouts.

Hash

Don't feel guilty if you don't know C/C++ at this point in your life.
The most interesting people I know didn't program in C/C++ at age 22.
Some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of Caffeine.

Be kind to your wrists
You'll miss them when they're gone!

Maybe you'll research, maybe you won't
Maybe you'll work for Microsoft, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll be a senior network adminstrator at 40
Maybe you'll be the CEO of Apple at it's 75th anniversary

Whatever you do 
Don't sleep too much
Don't stay awake too much either
Your hash table should be at half capacity, so should everybody else's

Enjoy your UNIX box, use it everyway you can 
Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it
It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Compile
Even if you have nothing coded but your "Hello World" Program.
Read the man pages -- even if you don't follow them
Do not read conference journals - they will only make you feel stupid!

Get to know your professors - you never know when they'll change your 
grade
Be nice to your classmates - they're the best people to network with
And the people most likely to give you a job in the future.

Understand that friends come and go
But for the precious few you should e-mail.
Work hard to bridge the gaps between Netscape and Internet Explorer
'cos the older you get - The more you need the HTML tags you knew when you
were young.

Study AI once - but stop before it makes you "high level"
Study Logic Design once - but stop before it makes you "low level"

printf();

Accept certain inalienable truths: CPU speeds will rise, operating systems 
will crash, and you too will become obsolete.
And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young
CPU's were slow, 
Operating systems were stable,
And people wrote programs in Java.
Write programs in Java

Don't expect anyone else to code for you
Maybe you'll have a "Hack Pack"
Maybe you'll have a smart roommate
But you never know when either might run out.

Don't mess too much with your style
Or by the time you're 40, your code will look like pasta

Beware of who's functions you copy
But be patient with those who supply them.
Code reuse is a form of nostalgia
Dispensing it is a way of fishing the programs from the hacker,
Tightening it up, replacing the inefficent parts.
And recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the Comp. Sci.

By Michael Wallick
  with help from Michael Durso