Live data from Hacker News

A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

medium.com

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of these things I've had to suppliment myself dating > back into highschool when I started programming. I'm lucky > I got a head start. There's graduate students at my school > who couldn't for their life tell you what historically > important programs/protocalls are like vim or telnet is, > who don't know who RMS is, who don't know what Bell Labs > is, who don't know that by writing code they own it to > some…

> why should a protocl like telnet be relevant today A lot of software uses "telnet" as in TCP sockets with \r\n and ASCII encoding. That's all telnet is and that's how a lot of data is shifted around all the time. > To learn from its mistakes? Telnet wasn't a mistake. It was an obvious step from terminals via RS232 to terminals via TCP. Also, telnet is everywhere. If you went into research and someone said "just hoo…

You were talking about grad students; those people are training not to be in the routine industry jobs.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you get an internship and take a leave of absence afterwards if the company will offer you a full time position? If you don't want to finish your degree and you can get a job offer you don't need to go back. It should be noted that this will make getting into grad school ever next to impossible and getting a work visa outside the USA very, very hard at best. For Physics try the Structure and Implementation…

> Why don't you get an internship and take a leave of absence afterwards if the company will offer you a full time position? If you don't want to finish your degree and you can get a job offer you don't need to go back. It should be noted that this will make getting into grad school ever next to impossible and getting a work visa outside the USA very, very hard at best. I'm pretty happy where I am right now because I…

If you're happy where you are then keep doing what you're doing. You need to supplement your learning yourself in all cases, not just college or high school. Pass the stuff you need to pass and get out.

If necessary quote in major and total GPA separately on your resumé for your first job. Get internships.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#33
post #27

I think a but source of this issue is the house amount of unrelated classes I must take in college. I'm very lazy when it comes to things I have absolutely no interest in. I think I can provide some useful insight. Right now I'm at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am in the Ying Wu college of computing science. After this semester (at the start of the third year) I will have no more computer science classes I ne…

The reason I have a history degree and not a CS degree is because the asinine tie-ins with the mathematics department made it nearly impossible to get back on track if you did not take calculus 1 your freshman fall. I still fume, thinking about the data structures and algorithms clasd I suffered through, where we wrote reams of proofs, but not a line of executable code.

Yes a CS degree involves CS, I am a bit shocked that this was never made clear to you.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#34

I think a but source of this issue is the house amount of unrelated classes I must take in college. I'm very lazy when it comes to things I have absolutely no interest in. I think I can provide some useful insight. Right now I'm at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am in the Ying Wu college of computing science. After this semester (at the start of the third year) I will have no more computer science classes I ne…

Read the "Credit By Examination" section on this page:

http://www5.njit.edu/registrar/transfer/

If you're willing to self-study and pay for some tests, you could potentially CLEP out of Physics, Calculus, your non-CS lower-level course requirements, etc. Talk to your registrar.

Testing out of all the basic stuff could cut your list of remaining classes by half, and you won't have to worry about some bad score in a history class bringing down your GPA because you only cared about passing.

And even if you wanted to be well-rounded, it'd still be a good way to bypass boring general education courses and get into more rigorous and interesting upper level classes where the professors and the students care more about the subject matter.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#35

I think a but source of this issue is the house amount of unrelated classes I must take in college. I'm very lazy when it comes to things I have absolutely no interest in. I think I can provide some useful insight. Right now I'm at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am in the Ying Wu college of computing science. After this semester (at the start of the third year) I will have no more computer science classes I ne…

Read the "Credit By Examination" section on this page: http://www5.njit.edu/registrar/transfer/ If you're willing to self-study and pay for some tests, you could potentially CLEP out of Physics, Calculus, your non-CS lower-level course requirements, etc. Talk to your registrar. Testing out of all the basic stuff could cut your list of remaining classes by half, and you won't have to worry about some bad score in a hi…

CBE only applies to specific courses. Not upper level.

" For students interested in gaining credit for more advanced (upper division) courses, most of our academic departments offer a limited number of exams in their academic area. Interested students should contact the individual departments and learn about the availability of tests and procedures for being tested. Once the academic department has approved a request for a departmental examination, the student may be referred to the Counseling Center to complete forms."

For CBE we would just give the students the tests in CS100. It doesn't work the same for upper.

Another problem is they want you to parrot back some things that they say. For instance in our OS class we had to learn about Solaris and memorize some commands for Solaris. We had to learn things like what is "JCL". These were not for the operating systems side. This was because the professor did that at his place of work before coming to NJIT. Naturally since he did it, it has to be good for all of us.

The courses are thrown together so CBE is near impossible. I'd say you need to know less about how something actually works and more about what the professor thinks is important.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should a protocl like telnet be relevant today A lot of software uses "telnet" as in TCP sockets with \r\n and ASCII encoding. That's all telnet is and that's how a lot of data is shifted around all the time. > To learn from its mistakes? Telnet wasn't a mistake. It was an obvious step from terminals via RS232 to terminals via TCP. Also, telnet is everywhere. If you went into research and someone said "just hoo…

You were talking about grad students; those people are training not to be in the routine industry jobs.

Ah so it's only ok for the ignorant to stay in academia. Sounds reasonable. Those dolts shouldn't be expected of anything anyway.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the "Credit By Examination" section on this page: http://www5.njit.edu/registrar/transfer/ If you're willing to self-study and pay for some tests, you could potentially CLEP out of Physics, Calculus, your non-CS lower-level course requirements, etc. Talk to your registrar. Testing out of all the basic stuff could cut your list of remaining classes by half, and you won't have to worry about some bad score in a hi…

CBE only applies to specific courses. Not upper level. " For students interested in gaining credit for more advanced (upper division) courses, most of our academic departments offer a limited number of exams in their academic area. Interested students should contact the individual departments and learn about the availability of tests and procedures for being tested. Once the academic department has approved a request…

You were complaining about having to take non-CS classes, many of which sounded like lower level general education classes, so I offered a potential solution: weed out some of those classes with CLEP exams.

I didn't see that your problem was related to your upper level CS coursework. If you aren't even interested in that, then you really should consider taking a break from school before you burn out. Maybe become a TripleByte candidate or something and get a software engineering job at a startup, or look for a local business that needs someone skilled to help them out.

Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBE only applies to specific courses. Not upper level. " For students interested in gaining credit for more advanced (upper division) courses, most of our academic departments offer a limited number of exams in their academic area. Interested students should contact the individual departments and learn about the availability of tests and procedures for being tested. Once the academic department has approved a request…

You were complaining about having to take non-CS classes, many of which sounded like lower level general education classes, so I offered a potential solution: weed out some of those classes with CLEP exams. I didn't see that your problem was related to your upper level CS coursework. If you aren't even interested in that, then you really should consider taking a break from school before you burn out. Maybe become a T…

I'm fine with the upper level CS classes but those are the only ones I could dream of making myself self study for.
Post reply on HN