Why Computer Science

Post by _delirium » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 9:17 AM UTC

kylemaxwell wrote: post #4

Passions such as art history are far easier to pursue in life by constantly reading books, going to museums, and attending lectures. Computer science is impossible to engage with on a casual basis. It requires a massive and highly focused investment of time and energy, ideally with the world’s best teachers guiding you at the same time. First, I don't know that I agree with the first bit. One may certainly dabble in…

I've noticed this with philosophy; I did a CS degree, and was self-directed "interested in philosophy", but found my handful of philosophy-minor classes massively helpful compared to only self-studying. I still mostly read philosophy on my own nowadays, but I often feel that I'm missing some of the more solid grounding that I'd have had if I'd done a full degree in it. Giving myself crash courses on background I'm missing by reading Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries isn't quite the same. I think it would've helped in my actual area of research as well (some AI problems are closely related to philosophy problems), but there's only so much time in undergrad, at least if you plan to graduate in a reasonable amount of time, and the CS was probably on the whole more relevant than more philosophy would've been.

Post by _delirium » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 9:28 AM UTC

gliese1337 wrote: post #5

> I was tempted to switch into art history > to escape the huge engineering workload. My association with friends in the fine arts indicates that that would've been a horrible decision; probably depends on what college/university you're at, but while engineering majors seem to have a pretty consistently high workload, visual design, music composition, and art history majors seem to get periodically slammed with horre…

I suspect it's because there're lots of people who would like to do fine arts, so they make all of the 100-levels incredibly intense to filter in just the ones who are really talented and dedicated. Sometimes I wish they'd do the same thing with the CS department.

This used to be somewhat traditional, to have a hardcore 100-level CS class as a weed-out, but my impression is that curricula are moving away from it. Partly, there's a worry that it mainly rewards how much knowledge you have coming into college: if the CS-101 course is really hardcore, the people who pass it are those who learned a lot about computer science on their own in high school. But if the university is supposed to provide an education program that can teach CS to people who don't already know it, that isn't quite what you want.

It also tends to work directly against universities' recruiting goals: they're spending all this effort to try to convince "non-traditional" CS majors (i.e. people who weren't already high-school computer enthusiasts) that it's an interesting and useful field to study, in which case you don't want to immediately kick them out in the first semester for not already being proficient enough.

Re: Why Computer Science

Re: Why Computer Science