31–40 of 71 posts
If cost is an issue, go to your local state uni (not private). The education will at least be credible and diverse, and you'll earn back your tuition in just a couple years out. Depending on where you live, some state schools are among the best in the country. It's terribly hard to justify going out-of-state or to a private school on a purely monetary basis unless it's someplace really very special or you get a free…
First, undergrad research. I was able to participate in undergraduate research at my university. They offer an engineering (including CS) undergraduate research initiative for students to work with faculty mentors, and some professors receive NSF REU grants which allow them to fund undergrads for a semester or more to do research with them. These opportunities don't jump out at you, however, and you need to take the initiative to talk to professors and discover the opportunities. Don't think you are too "inexperienced" either - you can start looking in your first or second semester. If you decide to apply for graduate school in a few years, you'll find that having undergraduate research is a huge plus for your application.
Also, yes, my school offered C++ and Java as the required programming languages. However it's not going to matter what they offer - you really learn programming once (not a trivial task), and from there, you can pick up whichever languages you need (a comparatively trivial task). Most importantly, you should learn outside the classroom -- make your own projects/applications/websites or contribute to existing projects. I did. This helps in a lot of aspects -- it trains your motivation, improves your skills in programming, can be used as resume fodder, and so on.
Do live on campus, at least for the first year, if not more.
- does your 'refusal to buy into this idea' prevent you from seeing additional options?
- is it really a binary question, or are there a range of possible solutions to your need that include different mixes of university and work
I got a Ph.D. at age 20 by being a bit creative with the institutional side of things. My university, rpi.edu, brought me in as a transfer student from nowhere and gave me credit for university-level classes i had sat in on at skidmore college and through johns hopkins cty program. i finished the last 2.5 years of my undergrad in 2 years by cleverly managing course requirements and taking a few extra classes. Then i cranked through my ph.d. while getting sent to japan for a summer through the nsf, and to conferences in Nice and Hungary.
if you set out a list of all that you would like to do and view university more as a mix-and-match opportunity, there are a lot of ways one can do things, that can be more productive than the traditional route.
for example, one could camp out in palo alto and attend a pile of stanford classes and events, plus tech industry startup events, plus ...
for two years i was on a campus without being a student there... but hey, some people like to get a degree and have a student i.d. card. at what cost though... food for thought ;)
>Are there still places out there that offer a diverse undergraduate Computer Science program that goes beyond teaching Java and C++ and focuses on the application of these technologies to create things? That's not computer science, that's software engineering. If that's what you're interested in, you could look at RIT. That said, I'm guessing you're in high school, which means you may well not really know what you w…
Also my favorite Quake server (kitty1.stanford.edu) was run from a Quake CS Lab :)
Yes, you will learn Java. Yes you will learn compiler design. But you will not learn ANYTHING about real world programming and you will find very few people with an entrepreneurial spirit.
If I had to recommend schools it would go in this order: 1) Stanford 2) Carnegie Mellon 3) Anywhere in NYC (only because you are exposed to the opportunities of the city, regardless of school)
One point that is seems to come up over and over is that there really is no classroom substitute to actually building something and making it work. Any research you do in college is going to be very different from a software job you get in industry. (There are exceptions of course - industry research labs like microsoft research or maybe even Google can get pretty close) However, college is still going to be a very v…
Also -- +1 on internships. They were super valuable for me. For example the summer I spent in the theoretical physics dept at Fermilab helped me figure out what I didn't want to do :)
>Are there still places out there that offer a diverse undergraduate Computer Science program that goes beyond teaching Java and C++ and focuses on the application of these technologies to create things? That's not computer science, that's software engineering. If that's what you're interested in, you could look at RIT. That said, I'm guessing you're in high school, which means you may well not really know what you w…
Disclaimer: I am a PhD student at Stanford. Why do you say the opportunities to do research as an undergrad at Stanford aren't great? The CS department has the CURIS program ( http://curis.stanford.edu/ ) which pays for Stanford students to do research with faculty during the summer. A few dozen students do this program every summer. We had a few students work with us last summer and it was a great experience.
I would expect that as ramchip notes informal arrangements can be done most anywhere, although getting paid in any way other than experience may not be.
One maybe not so minor note: according to one school that is ABET accredited, only 210 in the US have ABET accredited CS programs. E.g. my home town 4 year public college doesn't have one, I'd have to go to a larger regional one 70 miles away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too. Those are social-status problems [and thus, I could answer snarkily, amenable to social engineering.] A University is a clique of people who pay a lot of money to attend a University. If the only technical advantage ev…
It may not be just the lectures that matter, but I definitely learned a lot and developed technical maturity as a result of my courses . Could I have learned them on my own if I had known exactly what to study? Maybe. Were there bad courses along with good ones? Yes. Are there bad students that still get degrees? Yep. Was it worthless? Absolutely not. Example experience that could not have been had outside college, b…
That'll teach you ^_^.
MIT's new core courses are so teaching intensive the department is enlisting undergraduates to help and I think it's generally been possible for a few undergraduates to get some formal teaching experience of that sort.
I've always done some teaching informally and found the experience to be extremely valuable, it teaches you all sorts of things including a much better understanding of the subject itself.