@Test(expected = ComputerEngineeringErrors.class)

You might be wondering about the strange title of this post.
In this post I am going list a few mistakes which I regret doing back in college. I don't know how different my professional life would have been had I not made these mistakes but all I know is that these were "mistakes" which shouldn't have been made and should not be repeated by any one.
Before getting into lessons learnt following is the technical description of the title.

@Test is the Junit annotation to tell the Java compiler that following function is a test.
When we test a function say divide(int a, int b) {return a/b;} and we know if b is equal 0 we will get a "divide by zero", so to tell the test case that we expect an exception thrown we write expected = ErrorExpected.class

MISTAKE 1: Chased internship in a giant technical companies rather than working in a startups or a research based project.
I was so intrigued by the idea of how computer engineers work professionally that I deliberately ruined the opportunity of working in 2 startups during summer vacations via on-campus internship programs. In one of them, the interviewer had known a senior of mine, for whom I had made some

plugin to be used in his website. I didn't know that he(senior) was now working with this startup and even before my interview process, the interviewer told me that he already knew about the plugin which I had made for that website and is really looking forward for the interview and I totally ruined my interview deliberately because I knew that if I take this internship opportunity, I would not get a chance to appear for another internship interview via the college placement cell. To add on to my mistakes, I didn't even made an effort to at least pick a research based project under some professor's guidance so that I could at least do a quality project in the vacations. In the end, no more companies came for the internship process and secondly I thought it would be too dumb to do a research based project and it won't give me a professional exposure.

MISTAKE 2: Underestimated the power of delta change in resume
Through out my engineering life, I continued to skip of small project. Ex, a professor once had a project which was say, 75% done and the professor was looking for students who could test it, continue the development and give the performance number but the research or the scope of that project had already been defined and done. I thought since I had not started on this project, I should not take this task because it won't be 100%  my own research. In my fourth year of engineering I realized that to do a big project one should preferably begin with such smaller things because first of all it is not too much burden all together and secondly, one should not dream of coming up with something big in just first attempt.Most of the owners of successful startups had initially failed bad in their carrier before making it big.
Such delta changes in your resume reflect a lot of change at the end of your engineering life. Rather than waiting for a big day when everything will fall in place it is a lot better to do something small today even if it is as meager as learning a new desktop shortcut .

MISTAKE 3: Ignored some really good ideas
In college, I had a tendency to grade my ideas as "Not good" and ignore them. I don't know why I did that may be because I was afraid of executing/implementing them or may be it was because I didn't believe in my own ideas or I didn't brainstorm on it a lot. A lot of times I ignored the ideas because I felt that there was a technical blocker which I am bound to face in future and didn't know about the right resources or right people to contact. One time I had this idea that there should be a website where students can post some class notes or exam papers. Though this idea may seem to cliche now but back then we didn't have any such website, so it was actually a potential opportunity which I totally missed. A few days later some seniors launched such website using a basic "Wordpress Template" and with just basic functionality to download pdf verison of notes and exam papers. That idea could have been extended to an app on with uploading rights to based on college identity/admission number.
Lesson learnt was never ever ignore your ideas even if you feel they are too basic or not so important. Because you feel that something is missing around your college or locality, it is very much probable someone else is missing it too. All problems are opportunities is disguise and don't fill your eyes with tears if you miss one because it will double the chances of missing another. Important point on which you should work upon is figuring out that whether have you missed an opportunity or not. For ex, when I didn't work on the college website idea, I didn't even recognise it as an opportunity.

I hope that you will not make these mistakes or miss another opportunity.