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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

#161

Post by abfan1127 »

Bakary wrote: post #145
abfan1127 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid off $240,000 in 3 years by not being an idiot with my money. I got on a budget with my wife. We cut up our credit cards because we always double or triple spent our money. We budgeted for things like Christmas. We followed Dave Ramsey's plan. We're 2 months from paying off our house now. Edit - I went back and checked, it was $140k.

How much did you tally as living expenses during that period? As a rough estimate

it was 10ish years ago, so this is a guess...

Mortgage was $750ish water/electric $200 phones/internet $100 food $500-600 fuel $25 insurances ??? $100-200

maybe $1500-2000 a month. $20-25k year in real expenses.

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

#162

Post by vitus »

vmception wrote: post #97

How do you guys feel about this? He signed up at an accredited university and then used non university resources to transfer credits in, which weren’t universities at all Is that concept new? Is this something we can all be doing for other degrees or is this barely accredited and will come under fire very soon and stop being respected long before

I went to a public 4-year university and transferred in community college credits that I'd previously used to satisfy high school graduation requirements.

Requiring courses from a university is assuredly too high a bar, given that it would exclude anyone who, say, transferred from a community college into a 4-year program (several of my brightest peers fell into that category).

Several of these courses (Calc 1, American Government, Environmental Science, Stats) are comparable to taking AP exams (cost of $95) for credit, which you could ostensibly do without taking the course in the first place.

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

#163

Post by kevindong »

nwsm wrote: post #157
kevindong wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ABET accreditation doesn't mean much for CS however. For example, none of these schools are ABET accredited for CS: - UC Berkeley - CMU - Stanford - Cornell - University of Washington - Caltech - Princeton https://amspub.abet.org/aps/category-search?disciplines=19&d...

Add WGU to that list and tell me which one doesn't belong.

I'm not arguing for/against WGU.

My argument is that ABET accreditation isn't relevant to how "good" a CS program is. It does establish a minimum baseline, but lacking it just means you have to determine the program's value in other ways.

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

#164

Post by abfan1127 »

doytch wrote: post #155
abfan1127 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living expenses is a flexible item. You learn to keep your living expenses down.

Yes but it's a touch difficult to keep living expenses below $0, which most people in the developed - let alone developing - world would need to do on their salaries to save the extra $80k/year.

ha, yes. looking back, I don't know how we did it as fast as we did. we kept our expenses low (20-25k/year low) and poured every dollar into the debt. We didn't live in a fancy house or have new cars (beyond when we got in to it with the new car loans).

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

#165

Post by asddubs »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #117

Requiring a computer science degree to apply for a programming job has always been bizarre to me and this blog post is a great example of why. "The bulk of the effort was memorizing things that I normally would have Googled." And given how memory works, in a few weeks you'll probably have to Google them again. To earn my CS degree I learned a lot of stuff before starting my career that I never used. It would have bee…

You know the things you learned exist, at least approximately what they're useful for, and what you have to search for to look them up. I think it's definitely not a perfect system, but having programmed a long time before I started studying computer science, it did fill a lot of knowledge gaps I didn't even know I had. If you're working in a team you might not notice this as much, though, as long as at least someone knows what they're looking for.

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

#166

Post by vmception »

fayten wrote: post #159
vmception wrote: post #97

How do you guys feel about this? He signed up at an accredited university and then used non university resources to transfer credits in, which weren’t universities at all Is that concept new? Is this something we can all be doing for other degrees or is this barely accredited and will come under fire very soon and stop being respected long before

Those online classes he took are ACE or NCCRS accredited. Study.com for example can be transferred to many Universities: https://study.com/college/school/index.html#transferSearch Take a look at ACE and NCCRS: https://www.acenet.edu/Programs-Services/Pages/Credit-Transc... http://www.nationalccrs.org/policies-procedures

I did notice the classes themselves were accredited, and I also like the possibility of rapid iteration and refinement of the course material that these online classes can offer. ie. A university has one professor following an unchallenged lecture routine, whereas online can be very competitive and update and have the most useful style of visual aids.

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

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Cool. I applaud your achievement.

In my case, I have often considered going back for a degree (I had a "redneck tech school" education), but I could never justify devoting the time and money to get a degree in tech that would already be at least three years out of date by the time I graduated, qualifying me for a job, paying half of what I was already making.

Nowadays, the point is moot. I have spent my entire adult life, relentlessly self-teaching (still at it), and no longer need to prove anything to anyone (the biggest issue with not having a sheepskin, is looking up noses everywhere).

I love learning, and do wish I could have gotten a "more rounded" education, but the mitigating factor is that I have been shipping software, since I was 22, and that has taught me some stuff that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.

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

#168

Post by Privacy846 »

abfan1127 wrote: post #131
rfrey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means you earned more than $80,000 post-tax income surplus to your needs. That surplus is a third more than the US average total household pre-tax income.

You're right. But I also changed my mentality. We became intentional with our money. Its amazing how you can find money in a budget to put towards debt. Its also how you stay out of debt going forward. You learn to prioritize your spending.

It’s amazing what you can do when you earn way more than the median household.

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

#169

Post by ghaff »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #60
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.

Also I assume OpenCourseware and edX.

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

#170

Post by cxr »

abfan1127 wrote: post #107
astura wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of every single one of those "how I paid off $100,000 in debt in 1 year" articles. It's always like "dad got me an executive job at his company and grandma gave me a condo as a graduation gift so instead of living in it I moved in with my parents rent free and turned the condo into income stream. (Aren't I smart!?!) Since mom always had a gourmet hot meal prepared for me I could put all my income into my l…

I paid off $240,000 in 3 years by not being an idiot with my money. I got on a budget with my wife. We cut up our credit cards because we always double or triple spent our money. We budgeted for things like Christmas. We followed Dave Ramsey's plan. We're 2 months from paying off our house now. Edit - I went back and checked, it was $140k.

Heads up: this is a common pattern of expression that makes you come off as really obnoxious to people who will never tell you that that's what's happening. If you can't understand why people have a problem with this, here's the explanation: there are almost certainly smarter people than you who happened to be more unlucky than you.

You were lucky-but-stupid before, so you stopped being so stupid, and now your messages carry the undertone that anyone else is some variation of the person you were back in the stage before you wised up. It's a view that doesn't provide any space for people who were wise from the beginning. When you say things like what you said above, you're not highlighting how smart you are or getting down to how dumb other people are; you're just highlighting how lucky you were to even have the circumstances where you were allowed to be that stupid in the beginning.

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