I was a student of Electricity and Electronics, but during the last two years of my bachelor’s degree I found out that my real interest was in Computer Science. So apart from taking courses offered by my university, I also took CS courses from Coursera as a supplementary resource.
Take a peek at Larry’s Coursera course list:
- Cloud Computing Concepts, Part I offered through University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Functional Programming in Scala Specialization offered through École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Algorithms, Part I offered through Princeton University
- Machine Learning offered through Stanford University
When I needed to learn topics that my university didn’t offer, Coursera is one of the best places to go.
“Specifically, the Algorithms course helped me prepare for interviews, and I applied what I learned in the cloud computing and functional programming courses during my internship at Intel.”
My university did not offer the courses about Scala or Functional Programming or Spark. I completed part of Functional Programming in Scala which gave me fundamental knowledge and practice opportunities for these topics. This in turn helped me pass the Intel interview because one round is about this specific subject. Our team used Spark heavily so I was able to apply what I learned on Coursera during my internship as well. I finished the course and got my certification last December! I’ve listed my two certificates from Functional Programming Principles in Scala and Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark on my Linkedin profile.
The Algorithms course helped me gain a solid foundation in data structures, which is really helpful for almost all the interviews I’ve been through––most interview questions from well-known companies are about data structures and algorithms.
“And thanks to the university courses I took on Coursera, I became more comfortable with the English language before coming to the USA.”
#FunFact: “When I started out my English was really bad. After two years I can finally take courses without captions :D”
Larry recently graduated from Zhejiang University, China with a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Information Technology, and is now pursuing a M.S. degree of Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He’s interned at LinkedIn, Intel, and Huawei as a software engineer. Larry currently lives in Los Angeles and will return to LinkedIn as full-time software engineer next summer.
