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Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are several Oxonians on HN from the looks of it. I read for my DPhil in Computing, as did @cperciva.
When did you finish your degree? Perhaps we were there at the same time? Although I was in a part-time program, so it's more likely that you know my TAs :-P.
I recently completed my M.Sc in Software Engineering at the University of Oxford (Soft Eng is closely affiliated with ComLab, but is a slightly separate department) and I can only speak well of the program, its lecturers, and its resources. This looks like a great program; if I were 18 again I might consider going to Oxford for this undergrad degree.
There are several Oxonians on HN from the looks of it. I read for my DPhil in Computing, as did @cperciva.
I'm pretty sure there's at least a few dozen moderately active HN users from Oxford (I'm one).
Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures". As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately,…
They strongly encouraged CS majors to dual-major in CS/Philosophy or CS/Psychology. It was called the "Minds and Machines" program and was a precursor to their full-on undergraduate Cognitive Science program, Which didn't exist when I started in 2006 but does today.
I went in as Computer Science and picked up the CS/Philosophy dual-major in my first semester after talking at length to my advisor (who was head of Minds and Machines and is now head of Cognitive Science).
People ask me about it a lot when they find out, but to me it always seemed like an impeccably good match.
These two fields have been begging to merge for several years now. Great to see it happening. I'd like to see extended to a post-grad program. You could choose either business coding or academic coding. Both are rich areas for combining these two disciplines. Philosophy gives CS a broader, more conceptual view of how things fit together, and CS gives philosophy something useful to do -- it provides a hard edge from w…
You can manage to do something like that as a CS PhD if you have the right advisor, though it's harder to pull off than it used to be as CS has gotten much more obsessed about being a rigorous science. It especially used to be the case in AI, and in some corners still is, that a good thesis makes conceptual and philosophical advances in analyzing problems and domains (or proposing new problems), which are "validated"…
How does an American get in to a program like this? Especially if, say hypothetically, they dropped out of school to work.
Apply?
Applying isn't the same thing as "getting in"--it's one small part. Where do you apply to? What matters in the application? Do you apply under the course or do you apply generically? Are "A-levels" a thing that matters? What are people looking for in applicants, or how do you find out?
I did a math and philosophy double major. The danger of a degree like this is that the stark reality of a programming job will seem unbearably boring in comparison to what you studied in school.
Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures". As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately,…
Of course, this was York ("only" in the top ~10 UK unis), not Oxford (top 2-3).