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Why the bitterness against CS? As jarvic says, > However, CS and software development are not the same thing. A lot of schools offer a separate degree in Software engineering as opposed to CS (or at least separate tracks). So the distinction is pretty clear. Where I studied, there are separate degrees for CS and IT. You seem to be fudging the two. Do you expect physics majors to be mechanical engineers automatically?…
Sorry if I came off as bitter. I'm a couple of years out of college and honest I felt that the CS department was pretty self entitled and misguided. "CS degrees teach you algorithms" Yeah it does. And it doesn't feel like it's really enough. There isn't a feeling by the end that you've learned only a small fraction of the algorithms and I guess it felt like there wasn't all that much science. I went to a school with…
CS, at a graduate level, is a much more varied field than most people, even CS undergrads, realize. In fact, a lot of the main research groups in my department (graphics, vision, image analysis, robotics, VR, visualization) are things most CS undergrads don't even get exposed to.
In math or physics, a lot of the undergrad courses are kind of basic, entry-level things that give you a feel for some of the different fields of research without going too far in depth. This isn't really the case with CS, because CS departments have to cater to several different audiences who tend to fall into one degree. They have to come up with a curriculum that balances programming/development concepts for people who want to be developers, networking/administration stuff for people who want to be IT (although this is more and more being moved into a separate program), and theory for people who actually want to be computer scientists. Even then, this theory is mostly relegated to computation theory, which is only a small part of what research computer scientists do.
Personally, I'm in medical image analysis, which is a field which is a collision between a ton of different areas, including physics, statistics, operations research[1], numerical analysis, image processing, differential geometry, and medicine. I don't know that I would consider any of those fields to be the "easiest branch of mathematics" (what does that even mean, anyway?)
This post has kind of gotten off the rails a little bit, so I'll end with this: I think, if you just look at a CS undergrad program and try to project that to what actual CS research is like, you end up getting a much narrower and incomplete picture than if you do the same thing to a math or physics department, partly because CS research tends to be much more interdisciplinary than others (I have many more collaborators in many more areas than some friends of mine in math/physics/biology do).
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