I went to a top 5 school.. sorry to say there is no secret sauce the school gave us, no interview prep classes, and not a lot of TA sessions either - at least not with small sizes.
Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
What did help me and some of my friends more than anything was just grinding interview questions - going through CTCI 3-4 times until I could solve it in my head, doing random questions off glassdoor etc..
People love to paint rosy pictures of easy lives for top 5 candidates. The truth is college was insanely hard, many people were extremely stressed/depressed, we worked our asses off and sacrificed a lot. Ultimately to learn a lot more in 4 years than someone else, you have to put in a lot more time - there is no way around it.
>the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.
Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
What did help me and some of my friends more than anything was just grinding interview questions - going through CTCI 3-4 times until I could solve it in my head, doing random questions off glassdoor etc..
People love to paint rosy pictures of easy lives for top 5 candidates. The truth is college was insanely hard, many people were extremely stressed/depressed, we worked our asses off and sacrificed a lot. Ultimately to learn a lot more in 4 years than someone else, you have to put in a lot more time - there is no way around it.