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I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

miguelrochefort.com

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Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#51

Post by czbond »

neogodless wrote: post #7

This is interesting to me. I attended a public/state university for 5 semesters studying computer science, and dropped out due to personal matters (while also getting paid employment during the internet boom in a relatively rural part of the United States.) My first paid job didn't pan out, but then I got my first salaried position as a web developer, and I've been employed ever since (though I'm currently furloughed…

A comment on the CompSci part. For me, the CompSci degree was the best part of my entire technology background. I loved the classes that stretched the mind: Automata, multiple algo classes, etc.

The downside - is once I had exposure to those mental highs, programming wasn't nearly the same. The luster of C++ pointers or code optimization (or whatever) wasn't nearly the same after touching the deeper stuff. Which made me sad - to be honest.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#52

Post by tengbretson »

Jabbles wrote: post #5

Congratulations. It is somewhat surprising to me how some credits required vastly more effort than others. For example Algorithms 2 is worth as much as "Introduction to IT" - 4 credits each. Were there other restrictions on which credits you could use? In your opinion is this "fair"?

Credits are usually used as a proxy for how much out-of-classroom time the class will occupy in a week. Not necessarily the difficulty of the material.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#53

Post by TuringNYC »

chrisseaton wrote: post #38
TuringNYC wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any luck finding an online PhD? I've been looking for those. As much as I'd love to do a formal PhD program, I cannot with family, but the qualification (from whichever accredited university) would open up a lot of opportunities.

> but the qualification (from whichever accredited university) would open up a lot of opportunities I'd caution about this - if you think you can apply to jobs requiring a PhD I would think that when you apply the first thing they're going to do is to ask you who your advisor was and what you did. Unlike a bachelors just having a PhD isn't worth much - they will want to know what you actually achieved. If you have a…

Totally agree. This is definitely the case for places where the PhD actually matters. Except for a large number of jobs in NY (finance) and in DC (government), it is just a binary flag used to whittle down the candidate pool. In Government it is especially bad as some of these credentials are used for pay increases.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#54

Post by miguelrochefort »

TuringNYC wrote: post #20
miguelrochefort wrote: post #2

Author here. I'd be happy to answer your questions.

I'm very impressed with your tracking of effort on each course. How did you track the hours? If you were doing two courses at a time, how did you split your time tracking?

I've been tracking every minute of my time (to a 15-minute resolution) for the past 24 months using Google Calendar. It's part time-blocking, part time-tracking.

Here's what my "Study" calendar looks like: https://i.imgur.com/BBLeYmy.png

In green are events I created manually. In orange are predicted study sessions based on tracking data from ActivityWatch [1], which tracks my desktop, laptop, phone, and even my Chromecast usage. I get roughly 80% coverage with it, and 100% coverage with manual time tracking.

In fact, I built a "WGU Time Tracker" for my capstone project, which attempted to automatically classify my ActivityWatch data into study sessions using NLP, machine learning, and heuristics. I might write a post about it.

[1] https://activitywatch.net/

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#55

Post by skeeter2020 »

djsumdog wrote: post #37
simoneau wrote: post #21

Does anyone have a good sense how online degrees are perceived by employers? Or graduate programs? I wonder if the pandemic will be shifting these attitudes.

When you're given a resume, do you look at the education, other that briefly? If it doesn't sound like an online program (e.g. University of Phoenix) I doubt most would notice. But then again, I never see resumes until someone asks me to do a phone screening. Even then, I kinda glance at them enough to figure out which set of questions to pull out. So I guess that decision is made well before me. Getting to the actua…

When I see degrees from universities I've never heard of I assume they're diploma mills and look them up. Often they're not but fill a particular niche in learning or circumstance. This is the major failing with the US system IMO, in Canada the word "university" has a much stronger legal definition so there is more trust in it. Similar to what happened to the title "Engineer" when programmers started using it*

*I have a MSc in Software Engineering but I am not a PEng

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#56

Post by JamisonM »

ajkjk wrote: post #36

> In 2012, I studied computer science at Concordia University and dropped out after 1 semester. > On my first day, I attended 2 lectures. I quickly realized that a 2-hour commute to listen to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint wasn’t the best use of my time. It's so depressing that a lot of expensive higher education is this pathetic. I wish our education system worked enough like a market that it could hold lecturer…

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most of getting a Comp. Sci. degree at Concordia University isn't actually "listen[ing] to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint". Having attended a public University in Canada myself it certainly wasn't my experience (and also not very expensive, Upon completing the article my main takeaway was that the author would have been a lot better off just toughing it out at Concordia in the first place. If you are the sort of person that tries something once for a few hours and then just backs away from it entirely they way this person did.. it's really something!

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#58

Post by martamorena918 »

Clickbait headline... Should be "How to get a CS degree in the time you need to be ready".

Cool that something like this exists, and I support it. For me it was similar. I studied math and physics for 6 terms and was programming since age of 6. Then my thesis adviser told me that all my thesis suggestions are for CS, not math. So I thought, well what the heck, let's just write a CS thesis. I did all the missing coursework in half a year and wrote my thesis in the second. This would be of course utterly impossible without the background I had at that time. (I studied in Germany, where you generally have full control over your studies. I.e. you can do all courses from all terms at the same time, for instance)

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#59

Post by ghaff »

paxys wrote: post #43

This is interesting, but from what I have seen in the industry a CS degree is only really useful if you are starting out or are a relatively junior developer. With 10+ years of experience, an additional "BS degree from XYZ University" line on your resume is worth pretty much nothing.

In the article he suggests that wasn't really his experience and it's hard to argue with someone's experience. I also read him as just being bothered by the fact that he had never gotten a degree. Given that, and the way/circumstances under which he did it, it's hard to argue with just online enrolling for a semester and doing it.

From what I understand, it can sometimes be useful to have the paper. On the other hand, I'm sure you're right that a lot of the time in tech someone with 10+ years of experience probably doesn't add a lot by getting a credential like this--especially if e.g. there were significant opportunity cost to doing so.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#60

Post by read_if_gay_ »

seiferteric wrote: post #26

This is very interesting to me. I have an EE degree but have been doing software full time since I graduated in 2009. Even though I am mostly self taught and feel competent enough compared to my coworkers, I frequently have pangs of self doubt around not having a CS degree. Mainly worry about not having a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data structures. I have been thinking for a while of an online CS degree and t…

> Mainly worry about not having a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

Why not just look at these then? As an example you could check out MITs algorithms and DS lectures on Youtube. An entire degree might be a lot of wasted effort.

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