Awesome. And I feel for this guy, knowing what the next four years is going to be like for him. Sitting in classes listening to an instructor spend a whole week explaining how a "for" loop works to students who for the most part won't be able to successfully write their own "for" loop by the time they graduate (with a 3.5 GPA in CS).
I wish there was a degree path in "software" rather than "computer science", since that's what a kid like this needs. Turning algorithms into code is clearly solved for him. But I bet a few years of turning "nothing" into "shipping software" would be a lot more useful (or at least a lot less of a waste of time).
> Sitting in classes listening to an instructor spend a whole week explaining how a "for" loop works to students who for the most part won't be able to successfully write their own "for" loop by the time they graduate (with a 3.5 GPA in CS).
That may be true at some places, but certainly not in the intro curriculum at the UofC. The intro course for majors with no background uses the Scheme-based How to Design Programs curriculum, which doesn't even _have_ a for loop :-)
The honors intro, which I assume this student would enroll in, is a quite challenging curriculum, expecting students to learn scheme, haskell, perl, bash, and some basic parsing tools over the course of a quarter. And do reasonable things with them.
So, while I'm certainly biased as a grad student here at the UofC, I could promise the student they won't be getting slowly spoon-fed language features. Even if they took the intro CS curriculum for non-majors in the sciences.
It is difficult to say this without sounding arrogant but my god did I suffer during my college years because of this.
Every class, every project, every assignment I felt damn I already know all this.
It also makes team work a torture. I didn't want to ruin other people's experience by being the know it all guy.
So I just avoided teamwork as much as I could because pretending that I'm challenged by the question/project
got even more depressing.
Having to pay thousands of dollars for it makes it even harder (I simply had to do it as I'm not a citizen).
I'd think man there's so much more that I could do with this money I'm paying for something I already know.
That's not to say I think I know a lot, in fact I think I know very little but just that the college wasn't providing anything new for me (and yes it was one of the top ones).
I'm learning more by reading books and posts on the internet, hacker news, etc... and by doing actual work in the industry.
Uni is not just about the lessons. And you can always skip those lessons, or do other work in it.
Although there should be a way to skip the intro courses. But stuff does get interesting later, I got to write a compiler, write the same program in 4 different languages, learn how a CPU works and is designed, program in COBOL, functional languages and write software to interact with hardware. I would never have done that without Uni.
I'm in the UK and did a degree in software engineering which was pretty light on comp sci theory, but still had the similar pain of sitting through basic programming structure lectures for almost 2 years before hitting any kind of complicated software problems.
I can relate. I'm also from the UK and in the final year of my comp-sci based degree took a module titled 'Web Application Development'. Cool - we're going to be building a web app, I thought. Wrong - it was an introduction to HTML, CSS, and javascript. We didn't even have to make anything, just write snippets. In the final year for fuck's sake. What a waste of £20k.
Ah, mine wasn't so bad, my second year 'browser based applications' module involved creating open data mashups with jQuery, and a third year module in 'architectures and frameworks' used Groovy on Grails, so we did get into some pretty good modern stuff eventually.
Just as a mechanical engineering degree requires a lot of physics classes, a software engineering degree would require a lot of computer science classes. There would still need to be intro courses; he has demonstrated he could probably skip them.
I'm not sure what your "turning algorithms into code" comment means. If you're trying to say that he should skip the beginner courses, then sure. But I don't see how that relates to software engineering versus computer science.
Even if there were separate software engineering and computer science tracks, you can't say which one the author should be in. That depends on what he wants to do after college: be a professional software developer, or do computer science research?
I'm sitting in a intro web development class at my university. We're learning C# and basic HTML/CSS. I didn't know when our exam was, and I showed up one day and got a 100%. Intro programming classes are a waste of time for someone who knows how to code.
I wish there was a degree path in "software" rather than "computer science", since that's what a kid like this needs. Turning algorithms into code is clearly solved for him. But I bet a few years of turning "nothing" into "shipping software" would be a lot more useful (or at least a lot less of a waste of time).