What To Plan Next After Second Semester BCA: Practical Tips For Students And Parents
Last Sunday, I was folding my 19-year-old son’s pile of faded gaming hoodies on the living room couch when he flopped down next to me, holding his phone screen out. Half his BCA second semester group chat was blowing up, he said, with people sharing links to 6-month bootcamps and internship applications. “Everyone else has their next step figured out,” he said, picking a crumb off his sweatpants. “What am I supposed to plan next?”
I’ll admit I panicked a little. When we picked BCA over a general BSc or a full engineering degree 8 months ago, it was because he liked messing around with small coding projects after school, not because we had a 10-year career plan mapped out. I’d seen all the ads for expensive certification programs pop up on my Facebook feed, but I had no idea second semester was supposed to be the time to commit to one. I texted my neighbor Raj, who’s been a computer science lecturer at the local university for 15 years, and asked if we could stop by his porch for lemonade that evening. He said yes immediately.
Raj leaned back in his rocking chair and said he gets this exact question from second semester BCA students and their parents every single semester. Most people think by 6 months into your degree, you need to have your specialization picked, an internship lined up, and a resume ready to go. But that’s just not true, he said. Most first year coursework is just covering the basics to help you figure out what you even like. Then he walked us through what actually makes sense to do right now, no big investments or panic required.
First, he said, before you sign up for anything, do a 2-hour interest check. It’s not fancy. Just pull out a notebook and write three things you’ve done in the last two semesters that didn’t feel like homework. It could be a side project you messed around with for fun, an assignment you didn’t mind staying up late to finish, even something as small as troubleshooting your friend’s broken laptop. Then write down three things that made you want to close your notebook and walk away. No judgment, just be honest. That’s way more useful than picking a specialization based on what’s trending that year, he said.
Then, after that, pick one low-stakes short course that aligns with one of the things you liked. Don’t drop $1,200 on a full stack bootcamp right now. Most of the good introductory courses are free, anyway. Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, Google’s Digital Garage, and Coursera all offer 2 to 4-week introductory courses that only take an hour or two a day. If you liked the dice bot you built for your friend’s Discord, try an intro Python course. If you liked building your class project website, try a free responsive web design course. If you thought the bit about cybersecurity in your intro class was interesting, try Google’s free intro course. No pressure to finish if you hate it – it’s just to test the waters.
I asked Raj what parents can do to help, because I’d already caught myself scrolling bootcamp ads wondering if I was falling short as a parent. He said the biggest mistake people make is pushing their kid to chase whatever everyone else is doing. Instead of asking “do you have a plan for the future?” try asking “what’s one thing you worked on this week that wasn’t for a grade?” That’s a simple shift that gets them talking about what they actually enjoy, instead of shutting down when they feel pressured. If they finish their free short course and want to pay for a certificate to put on their resume, that’s a $10 to $30 expense, not a $1,000 gamble. You don’t need to spend big to help them test things out early.
We went home that night, and my son pulled out his notebook an hour later. He wrote down that he liked building the D&D dice bot for our game nights, that he enjoyed tweaking the website he built for his second semester project, and that he liked writing small scripts to resize photos for his photography account. He wrote that he hated microprocessor theory and couldn’t care less about building hardware. He signed up for freeCodeCamp’s 3-week responsive web design course, started going to the college coding club that meets once a week on Wednesdays, and is currently building a small website that lists all the food trucks near campus, with a working open/closed toggle.
I stopped asking him about his 5-year plan a month ago. I started asking him what he worked on that week that wasn’t for class. Last week he told me he added a feature that lets users filter food trucks by what kind of food they sell, and a group of the local food truck owners already said they’d share it when it’s done. He still gets anxious sometimes. Last night he mentioned one of his classmates already lined up a summer internship at a big tech firm, and he wondered if he was falling behind. He still doesn’t know if he wants to get a job right after graduation, go for a masters, or even freelance doing small website projects for local businesses. We don’t have everything mapped out. Right now, though, he’s not scrambling to keep up with everyone else. He’s just trying small things, figuring out what he likes, and that’s enough for now.
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