181–190 of 305 posts
The next year the department exploded and kids with 4.0s and previous internships were getting denied. This was also the first year with the new Dell-Gates Computer Science building. I didn't have a class in that building until my Senior year!
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A year or two is enough time to get your foot in the door with web dev. For more advanced stuff, sure, it's an ongoing process. On the other hand, I question the utility of most university CS curriculums. There are usually only one or two classes covering the core "algorithms" knowledge that autodidacts might not have, given how many people squeak through these classes by copying HW, I'm not convinced that anything r…
I agree on your fist point, but I can't speak to the modern curriculum or how it's tackled, since it's been over a decade since I was in uni. I do know that web dev is only a very minuscule subset of CS. A typical web dev may be able to tell me which algos are inefficient for a given task, but I can tell them why.
In fact, I think I could take any random person off the street, and provided they're motivated, teach them algorithms and data structures to BSc level within 3 months. It's not rocket science and any engineer who makes it out to be like "way hard" is just being a bit insecure over their knowledge.
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This article is so poor I dont know where to start. The Computer Science Stampede >> "While the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science at certain American universities more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, the number of Ph.D. candidates — the potential pool of future professors — remained relatively flat." They seem to ignore the three decades of legacy PhD graduates who gave up looking for jobs in acad…
No, but most recent PhDs can get a job at a FAANG company, where their starting salary will be much higher than a faculty salary (and that's before bonus, stock grant/options/etc). Even with the cost of living in the Bay Area, they'll be able to pay off student loans faster and will finally have time to enjoy life.
It is poor reporting to chose the most extreme possible anecdote (one person $1m-$4m salary) and then use that as an example of what is going on. The real story is...universities messed up badly structuring decent pathways for teaching positions and are trying to blame a hot market. There is also the ongoing story of poor measurement schemes (measure how good a teacher is by how good their research is) and the story of uncertainty (let highly accomplished academics rot in limbo-hell for a decade and use a tenure carrot to control them.)
BTW, the quote was from Cornell University's dean. I did my CS undergrad from Cornell. 90% of CS lectures were in a large hall where ~60% of the seats were empty, and this was in an upyear (1998-2001.) There was no shortage of space in the lecture halls. The teaching was mostly done by MS and PhD students, of which there were plenty -- the supply of recitation sections is quite elastic since there is no long-term commitment on either side.
This article is credentialism at its worst. The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own. These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.
This comment is elitism at its worst. Even if you completely accept the validity of self-learning, there is still a place for formal education. Some people can learn a lot about a complicated field on their own, but there are still plenty of people who would benefit from some pedagogical help.
Since when is being a software engineer a "high-status" job, as mentioned in the first paragraph? Most people would consider a non-washed out doctor or lawyer (which is expensive and difficult to achieve) as having higher status than pretty much anyone working with a CS degree, unless they are a successful founder or went into investments. Besides medicine/law, young people with some degree of privilege and ambition…
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I don’t get this. In the Netherlands I’ve studied for 4 years on hard computer science. Somehow someone from the US has done maybe 1.5 years of that and gotten the same degree?
How many computer science classes are needed for your degree? I believe when I was in college it was 9 classes (each one being one semester, about half a year). I took more than that, because I liked it, but many CS students just took the minimum. (This doesn't count requirements outside the CS department, like math, or other graduation requirements like "some total number of classes, at least three humanities classe…
Most non-US universities don't work like this. You get a programme that you follow, sometimes with alternatives that you can pick from. You don't have a target number of classes or credits or hours to complete. Everyone takes the same classes (except for the alternatives) at the same time in one big cohort all the way through the degree. There's not much flexibility for a minimum or maximum - there's just the one set path.
Why do US colleges over-admit like this? In the UK you apply to do a computer science course, and they have 50 places or whatever for that course, and so they admit 50 people. You can't get into the college and then be told that actually it's full. If they do accidentally over-admit it's their problem to solve, not yours.
The US university system is quite unusual (I believe Canada also has a similar system): at the undergraduate level you typically don't apply to a specific program; all students are expected to take a variety of classes (confusingly called "courses"), only some of which apply to a specific course of study. Domain-specialized classes become an increasing proportion of your overall classes after the first or second year…
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This article is so poor I dont know where to start. The Computer Science Stampede >> "While the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science at certain American universities more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, the number of Ph.D. candidates — the potential pool of future professors — remained relatively flat." They seem to ignore the three decades of legacy PhD graduates who gave up looking for jobs in acad…
No, but most recent PhDs can get a job at a FAANG company, where their starting salary will be much higher than a faculty salary (and that's before bonus, stock grant/options/etc). Even with the cost of living in the Bay Area, they'll be able to pay off student loans faster and will finally have time to enjoy life.
I don't dispute you can make a higher salary than a faculty member, even without working at a FAANG, but having a PhD won't automatically make you eligible to get such a job.
Why do US colleges over-admit like this? In the UK you apply to do a computer science course, and they have 50 places or whatever for that course, and so they admit 50 people. You can't get into the college and then be told that actually it's full. If they do accidentally over-admit it's their problem to solve, not yours.
>Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full. I know this doesn't refute the point the article is trying to make, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that an underclassman might not get into a highly sought after elective.…
At my uni the class sizes were huge, usually 1:300-400, and they only offer 1-2 possible class times. It feels like staff are dropping left and right so the profs that stay on are forced to do this. Many cs/engineering kids cant take the intro classes for a couple semesters, many upperclassmen can't take courses which are only offered in spring or only fall.