How to Become a Software Engineer at Google: Perseverance, Projects, AI

Nearly a decade ago, back in 2011, when I had just completed the 4th semester of my Computer Science & Engineering Degree course, I found that even though I had fared well in all my exams, my practical knowledge in this field was (in the words of Lord Kelvin -- the famous mathematical physicist)"of a meager and unsatisfactory kind". This was due to the fact that, aside from a handful of really great courses, the majority of my coursework relied on rote-learning and the competitive pursuit of grades instead of practical knowledge. I had joined the field of Computer Science to satisfy my childhood dream of working with computers, but I found I was still far from my dream of understanding and creating software with my computer. In this dismal state, I spent the beginning of my semester-break searching for a motivation in the online universe. After Googling for a short while, I stumbled upon Mehran Sahami's CS106A video lectures on Stanford's Youtube channel, and thus began my tryst with online education.