MIT^3
Depending on who you ask, I was either trained as a rocket scientist or a propellor head.
Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
171–180 of 189 posts
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#172MSc in Civil Engineering. Always worked as a computer programmer, never as a civil eng..
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#173BS on CS (Concentration: Machine Learning and Computational Logic) from GA Tech. Currently working as a Python (30%) and Lisp (70%) programmer for a startup.
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#174BS on CS (Concentration: Machine Learning and Computational Logic) from GA Tech. Currently working as a Python (30%) and Lisp (70%) programmer for a startup.
What gloucester does your username refer to?
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#175BS on CS (Concentration: Machine Learning and Computational Logic) from GA Tech. Currently working as a Python (30%) and Lisp (70%) programmer for a startup.
What gloucester does your username refer to?
It's from Hamlet. I chose the name because it's somewhat sui generis and thus not too many people will be using it as a user name.
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#176B.A. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)- Claremont McKenna (small lib arts college in SoCal); non-hacker, but man do I wish I could hack...
My partners are:
BA PPE & CS, Claremont McKenna BA Economics & CS, Claremont McKenna
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#177Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#178bs math Pomona College,
ms statistics, ms,phd computer science U Wisc -Madison
Am a programmer; love what I do.
6-word novel describing my life:
"It worked! Still can't believe it."
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#179PhD in Atomic Physics. Started programming with 16, started to love it when I wrote the code to run my lab automatically (adjust the lasers, pump the vacuum chamber, run the electron gun, calibrate the spectrometers and do the measurements), while I was downtown having a beer with my friends. Did it in ansii c on a eltec os 9 lab computer using a camac crate. I still had to type the thesis myself.
Cool. I minored in physics, and I thought it was much harder than CS. Respects from me.
Thank you!
Maybe I drop a word about why. CS was an option for me, but I would have done it only to learn more about programming (and maybe how the hardware works). Since I already knew a lot about programming when I was 18, I decided to go for physics, because Astronomy and Quantum physics were both also strong interest of mine.
Basically this decision opened a bunch of very interesting job opportunities in science programming that would have been hard to get into without a scientific degree. I can wholeheartedly recommend to not study CS, but a different science, especially if you know that you want to write software. You can easily learn programming by yourself and get detailed knowledge in another topic. This combination is hard to beat (most scientists are very bad at programming).
It was a lot of fun to program in my own lab environment. Maybe because I controlled the whole pipeline starting from requirements to finally using the software for my own scientific work.
Its a pity that this is rare. Currently I develop software for an ESA space observatory. Sounds incredibly cool, but sucks a lot because of the size of these scientific projects (and because of the bureaucracy of ESA and NASA).
Re: Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
#180High school dropout who has been a programmer for about 7 years now. Voracious reading habits on a wide variety of subjects, a willingness to work hard along with a constant assessment of knowing what I don't know has served me well.
I stretch but know my limits.