A bit of context for non-Princeton readers (commenting with a throwaway because I don't want to dox myself).<p>You can take the CS major as either a Bachelor's or an Engineering degree. Princeton requires all Bachelor's students to do two semesters of "independent work" their junior year, plus a thesis senior years. Engineering students have to do one semester of independent work, but they have to take additional courses and have more specific requirements. (The CS BSE degree is currently unique in not requiring a thesis.)<p>For many departments, junior independent work is a 20ish page research paper you write over the course of the semester either as part of a seminar or one-on-one with an advisor, so the CS independent work is intended to be roughly equivalent in terms of rigor. It's my understanding that most CS students work on a significant piece of software with a writeup at the end of the semester—often (but not always) in a semester on a single topic (eg computer vision, digital audio, etc) junior fall, and one-on-one with an advisor (or in a lab) junior spring. BSE students will often do their one semester of independent work senior year, in either form.<p>It's often pretty daunting staring at these requirements—and a lot of the onus is on you, the student, to figure out what you want to do and initiate it—so this advice seems to me to be aimed at students starting to plan their independent work.<p>Don't take this as gospel—I'm actually not a CS major, somewhat ironically, though I have many friends who are. Just hope this helps to contextualize Kernighan's advice.
In case you're not aware, Brian Kernighan worked with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Brian wrote a lot of the Unix text processing utilities, and is the "k" in awk.<p>"In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", a pun on the name "Multics."<p>His family is from Canada. I had the opportunity to attend a small lecture at U. of Waterloo on "Little Languages" when he was in town in the mid 80's, with about 10 other students. One of my biggest influences.<p>Some context on the article link. There was a time when CS was a novel area of research. A lot of the experimentation into OS theory was made obsolete by Linux, since you could just tweak an Open Source kernel instead of doing a PhD-length project in schedulers, etc.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan</a>
Man I'd love to have a two semester course where I could work on a project and get advice from <i>Brian Kernighan</i>. I hope all the Princeton CS students understand how lucky they are