Ask Slashdot: CS Degree Without Gen-Ed Requirements? 913
davidjbeveridge writes "I'm interested in getting a CS degree. I've been programming since I was 13, and like many of us, taught myself. I am familiar with a number of languages, understand procedural, functional, and object-oriented paradigms; I'm familiar with common design patterns and am a decent engineer. I learn quickly. I work 2 jobs and I have a life. I want to get a CS degree from an accredited school (a BS, that is), but I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like. While these fields are useful and perhaps enriching, they will not contribute to making me better at my job. Moreover, I attended an excellent high school that covered these fields of study in great detail, and I feel no need or desire to spend more time studying these things. I want a BS in Computer Science with no general education requirements. Any suggestions?"
US-only problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess this is a US-only problem. When I started my computer science degree at the University of Antwerp, it was pretty much only computer science. We had a few credits in economics, but that was really just general economics and that's it.
However, what are you expecting from studying CS? It's most likely not what you think it is. It's basically math, automata, algorithms, computability theory and stuff like that. If you plan to be a computer programmer and only that, you already have the skills required (even though, you probably make certain avoidable mistakes by if you don't know about computing theory).
If it is to have better chances to get a job interview, I can understand...
I don't regret having a computer science degree, it was very interesting, but it's not a course "how to become a better programmer".
Anyone considering computer science, should ponder the words of one of the greatest computer scientists of all times: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes", Edsger Dijkstra.
SOL (Score:4, Insightful)
A BS covers general education and major course work.
Your best bet is an AS degree. Then, come back later and get your BS.
You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you underestimate the value of those things. Most of these classes aren't strictly about history, english, and the like, but enhance your overall mental ability - such as the ability to write, comprehend, and reason, which frankly, is generally missing from those in our field.
If you don't have those things, that's fine, but that's not a BS or a BA, thats a trade school education.
Don't get a CS degree (Score:4, Insightful)
What you just want the piece of paper?
I spent a good deal in college CS classes, learning stuff that I already had a good idea what to do.
When it came to the real world I was quite prepared for anything computer related. It was every other subject that killed me. It was my lack of art classes that kept me from good design. My lack of English classes that kept me from good copyright. My lack of Business classes lead me to make wrong decisions.
Now I'm considering going back to school. But I'll stay as far away from CS as possible.
I once read somewhere that the things you don't know become your Achilles heal. Very true.
Go to school for an education. Not a piece of paper.
Humanities - you're wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, since the tone of your post suggests you are male, can I observe that exposure to the humanities tends also to enable you to meet (and discuss interesting subjects with) women? I'm not talking about sex, but improving your familiarity with the people you will meet as soon as you step outside the IT department, some of whom will influence your career.
Don't think that coding is all you need (Score:4, Insightful)
Beware: If all you can do is code there's a great chance your job will end up in India. You have to have broader skills now to be competitive. Instead of taking classes in an area you obviously know well (i.e. coding), why not take more general business classes or in the sciences so you can use your coding skills as a tool to solve critical problems rather than being a coder waiting for a problem to get assigned to you? 99% of the people you will need to work with aren't coders and if you don't have any general skills you won't be able to work with them as effectively.
Good luck,
-c
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely correct, if you don't want an all around education what you want is a vocational school and there is nothing wrong with that. However you will need that all around education to qualify as an engineer.
Given a choice most employers also prefer that you have that all around education. As someone who has hired 100+ engineers for his company I can tell you that a well rounded education is often what sets candidates apart.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
Being able to read/write/reason are all fine and good. But I'm not sure the effort and annoyance of those classes yields a payoff in those areas. You get very little feedback other than a handful of grades. All that for a ton of time and $1-2k for a class. At a whole lot of schools, these classes have become little more than perfunctory checks on writing and attendance. They seem wholly designed to make sure a certain amount of money is extracted from each student. The liberal arts ideals which mandate these classes are simply dead.
Seriously - do the GenEd (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it seems like a big waste and such, but seriously... do the general ed. classes. The last thing you need to do is to end up so single-minded that you can't even see a wider world out there.
You know the big stereotype about how geeks can't function socially? Remaining willfully ignorant of everything outside your chosen craft is a big symptom of that.
You may *think* that your high school covered all of that, but honestly, they likely did not. Even if it seems like total crap, you'll likely learn things about art, philosophy, English, history and the like that a high school class could never cover.
I remember thinking the same thing you did a long time ago, while chasing an EE. Then I took the required history class, and gained such a passion for looking into the past, that I minored in it. All it took was a prof that really loved what he taught, and expressed it in a way that touched off an intense curiosity to learn more. The more I learned on my own and beyond, the more I fell in love with where we've been as a whole, and in exploring the past.
Hell, it even helped out in my eng. classes. Proof? Researching why RMS Titanic's electrical systems held out for so long in spite of all that seawater coming in made for one of the most kick-ass papers I'd ever written, and it gave me an incredible respect for electrical technology back then. I wouldn't have given a shit if I wasn't interested in history, and my classmates were too busy analyzing and making shallow papers on the tech-du-jour (mostly centering on what they thought about the upcoming 1993 NEC).
But - you know the biggest reason why you should diversify? My degree is in Electrical Engineering. I took a couple light classes in programming (C++, FORTRAN, PASCAL...), and thought it was a waste at the time, but I had to fill electives. I'm a Sysadmin, have been so for 15 years, and have done programming professionally on occasion. I haven't done jack in the EE field since 1996, and my last license renewal expired a little over a decade ago.
Your career will likely diverge too, and having more than a single-minded subject under your belt will help you greatly, as well as give you alternatives and avenues that you may have never thought of.
Print up your own degree! (Score:3, Insightful)
Fraud is really your only choice. Seriously. No accredited program awarding a BS is going to let you skip out on General Education requirements; your two demands are mutually exclusive. That's intentional. BS programs are not technical college programs (which have their place), and they are not skills certificate programs (which also have their place).
If you don't want GenEd, you have two choices: an AAS degree, or a non-accredited BS/BA program. Few if any of those credits will transfer to an accredited program in the future, however. Accreditation provides a minimal guarantee of "quality", which is why colleges go through the (significant) effort required to obtain and maintain the credential. Caveat Emptor.
A final comment: a few additional things the General Education requirements are likely to teach you are 1) that you don't know as much as you think you do, and 2) a little humility.
Re:Hah, good luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
This is my reaction too. I wouldn't want to hire someone who is always looking for shortcuts.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a benefit to those non core courses.
You might not see it now, and some people never do, but it's there.
One thing that the more technical people have trouble with and I think turns them off is the softer nature of some of these courses.
History is important becasue it shows the effects of technology and consequences, it's also quite big on the important of context. Things that are right in one situation are disasterous in others. There are strong cases for many of the fields.
I have to say I've found some of those basic courses like philosophy, psyche 101 etc much more useful in the real world than some of the grad level math courses. I think those that discount them are missing the difference between "higher eduation" and "job training".
Stop scheming and take the damned classes. (Score:3, Insightful)
First, participating in general education classes is in no way a waste of time. Practicing and learning skills and knowledge in an array of topics is always beneficial and has a greater impact on an individuals effectiveness and ability to interact and collaborate within a society, within groups, and with other individuals. And whether or not your high school education covered the same topics it is unlikely the teachers and material will be identical and unlike many technical courses the general education classes can often provide new perspective and insight simply because you are learning from a different teacher and different book.
Second, if you truly do want a CS degree then stop wasting time trying to figure out how to work your way around the general education requirements and just take the damn classes. The time you spend taking these classes is a drop in the bucket compared to the probable amount of time you have to live and work in a career and hopefully even go back later and take more classes to expand your knowledge, experience, and perspective. It always astounds me when I see intelligent people who have the opportunity but waste precious years not getting an advanced education and usually it is due to the most minuscule barriers such as "I don't want to take the general ed classes, they are a waste of my time".
Just do it.
In Defense of the Liberal Arts (Score:3, Insightful)
That's where you're wrong. Speaking as a developer with a BA in English, I can tell you that your English, History, and Art classes will make you better at your job. They will make you better able to relate to people outside IT fields, better able to reason and argue logically, and give you a broader perspective of your (and your code's) context.
I can't tell you how many CS graduates I've seen at my workplace, lamenting how worthless their CS classes were because the tools we work with, and the problems we're trying to solve, bear no resemblance to their coursework. I've never heard the same from a liberal arts graduate, because everybody knows the point of a liberal education is to make you able to think critically, and give you the foundation you need to learn anything you need to learn later in life.
I kinda did this (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in a similar situation, here is what I suggest:
1) Take the Comp Sci AP test to get you out of the introductory CS courses and get you some credits from the start. The gen-ed courses weren't that bad to take: It may be the CS 101 classes that drive you nuts. "This is a for loop... this is a while loop..." and looking around at all the Art majors who think they can go into Comp Sci for the money and don't understand the concept of a variable.
2) Take any other AP test you think you can. Worst-case you lose money, best case you skip some courses. There is nothing wrong with getting a poor score on an AP test other than the loss of money. But talk to someone who has taken and/or teaches AP courses to get an idea of what you need to know. If you are still in high-school then taking the AP courses is the best approach.
3) Use community college to breeze through gen-eds. I decided on my final college and picked a community college to take my Gen-Ed classes. (I did it for financial reasons though). Pick the schools and classes so you guarantee a transfer. Then take nothing but gen-ed courses in the community college because they will be really easy. If you are as smart as you think, you might be able to do 2 years of gen-ed classes in 1 year. Most of those community college classes will be designed for slackers.
4) Grow up. Those gen-ed courses are actually some of the best parts of college. I am a geek to the core, but I loved discussing Descartes' meditations, studying economics, learning how the eye communicates images to the brain, and debugging why various wars started. If you think you can survive in the world knowing only what is in the computer you will be unable to accurately measure the world around you and efficiently apply what you have learned to your field. You won't be young forever so at some point you will wake-up and realize you aren't the best of the best of the best anymore, and you will want your niche in the real world. Computers are a tool - a means. True success requires more than just the means (your C.S.) to fulfill.
Re:All about the benjamins (Score:4, Insightful)
It astonishes me how many people don't understand that college is about learning to be a life long learner rather than setting one up in a particular specialty. If one wishes to ignore the breadth requirements, there are always apprenticeships and vocational training schools out there.
A school that produces a bunch of simpering morons that can't be employed tends not to last very long, as it's hard to get endowment checks coming in or new applicants when folks that graduate can't find gainful employment.
Re:get experience on your resume' (Score:4, Insightful)
Intelligent managers (managers that understand the position they are hiring for, as opposed to PHBs that are looking to fill an empty seat) will understand that experience can be more valuable than education.
And good managers will know (from experience) that hiring someone like this guy can be incredibly detrimental to a software team. Here you've got an idiot (seriously) who thinks he doesn't need to know something -- he already gets it. Dude, after learning about it in high school? Chances are, this person is difficult to communicate with, egotistical, combative instead of merely argumentative, and unwilling to think outside of defined corridors. He'll probable be hostile when asked to do something out of the ordinary. Quite likely, he's an asshole who will drown your entire team in bad feelings. He's a bad idea.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems obvious that he is looking for the BS degree because of career goals (like not having to work 2 jobs), not because of the education. Sadly it is getting harder and harder to get work in IT without a degree, regardless of your skillsets.
And while I agree that Gen-Ed courses have great value, I don't think it's fair to assume this guy doesn't like to learn. He seems to be self taught in software development (although who knows how well). Just because he would rather be learning design patterns, project management, and data modeling than history and philosophy doesn't mean he isn't interested in learning.
Re:University is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone mod this up! I couldn't agree. more. University is about education. More importantly, being reasonably conversant on a range of disciplines. The better ones, gasp, still try to offer that.
Focusing on one subject to the exclusion of all else is not a degree. It might be directly applicable to a given job, which makes the exercise job training. You might take subjects that you have no interest in or, more frustratingly, no aptitude for, but that's part of the ride. If nothing else, the reason such education is still valued in the modern world is that it proves an individual has at least the fortitude to tackle a spectrum of topics.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy shit!
What you're saying is almost EVERY University outside of the United States is just a trade school.
You see, everywhere else in the world, university is the place you go to learn and specialize in your field. They don't baby you, they don't teach you to "write", "comprehend", and "reason", that's what your high schools, and lower educational facilities are for.
Why should a university be trying to teach you, what you should have already learnt? If you don't have these skills, then you're going to fail, or at the most pass very poorly.
The only students who need to learn how to write, are the international students, and they usually do courses beforehand.
As for reasoning and comprehending, well fuck me, if they need to teach you this sort of thing at that level (beyond that which is required for your specialization, eg, the ability to understand programs), then your universities must be remedial universities.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, more likely, you decided at some point you were too good to benefit from engaged instruction at the college level, so you decided to blow it off and convince yourself that you're already a superb communicator instead. In the process you missed a potentially enriching experience and lost any sort of endearing humility in the process.
For you, it seems like It's about being more confident even when you're talking out of your ass.
"We autodidacts" have taught ourselves long ago that education is never solitary.
CLEP Tests (Score:5, Insightful)
Just take the CLEP tests if those Gen-Ed classes really have no value for you. You can complete almost your entire first two years of schooling with those tests. I just finished up going back to school (harder to move up now without a BS degree), and I saved a boat load of time and money taking CLEP tests for Gen-Ed classes that I didn't finish in community college a decade ago.
For truly well rounded self educated people, they should be a breeze. If it is hard to pass them, then you really do need those Gen-Ed classes (those areas of knowledge really do have value). But plenty of people who actually like to read (non-fiction) have no need to waste their time in 100-level Humanities classes.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:5, Insightful)
In my very limited experience as a senior programmer (but not a manager) given opportunities to interview and provide input on hiring decisions, I would never recommend hiring this guy.
Oh sure, there's probably some entry-level position on a short-term contract gig where he could contribute without much fuss. But as far as I'm concerned he'd be a liability in any full time position with possibility of advancement and significant contribution in development efforts of high business value. Someone who only cares about what he thinks is the important stuff will never be the motivated life-long learner that can advance in his career.
Sure, businesses these days are more than happy to ignore the larger picture in pursuit of the quarterly returns and the stock bump, so a real hiring manager would probably be fine with this -- they'd consider it "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented". Said business would get the blinkered, half-working, user-unfriendly software that instead of doing what it should be doing only does what the programmer thought it should do.
Re:get experience on your resume' (Score:4, Insightful)
You have the right of it, as they say. While it's possible to make a credible argument for focusing on learning the core set of skills for a career while minimizing time spent on associated topics in some circumstances, let's look at the actual words used.
Phrases like 'my precious time' and 'will not contribute to making me better at my job' are huge red flags for a inflated sense of self-importance. Dismissing the entire range of liberal arts as merely 'useful and perhaps enriching' betrays a level of arrogance that has the potential to incite team-destroying conflict.
Re:All about the benjamins (Score:5, Insightful)
I went to college, and that is not something I learned in college. What I learned at the University was that there were a bunch of colleges there that would not have a single student in them except for the general education requirements that forced a bunch of people to take stupid classes to fill out those GE Requirements.
And the sad thing is, that most of those liberal studies college degrees didn't require reciprocal cross training in hard sciences and math. And when they actuall did require it, it was hard watching all the future teachers struggle with basic math classes which would have been hilarious, except knowing that they were going to be teaching future students. And the most astonishing thing I can tell you, after working in education is that many (if not most) teachers don't actually want to learn anything beyond what is actually "needed".
I've found that most people who are into technology have a much broader discipline range in regards to learning, and that is caused by our general need to keep learning new stuff or get left behind in the "real world". I love learning, but only after having hated it during school.
This is nothing more than a classic example of "theory vs application". The difference between theory and application is that in theory, theory and application are the same, in application they are not.
Re:Hah, good luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, my general ed classes had girls in them.
Re:Pre-law? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that he describes himself as a 'decent engineer'.
He's not even a CS yet, but he's already an engineer.
No shortage of ego in the original poster, that's for sure.
To the original poster: All incoming freshman CS students that will ever amount to anything already know how to program. CS is not programming school. Engineering even less so.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that the person isn't interested in learning, he just doesn't see the value in learning outside what he feels he needs. The grandparent post is more spot on, he doesn't see the value in the other courses. Of course when he has a job in the profession and he's told that he needs to write a document on requirements or a system design, he'll sit there and tell himself "Well if only I had an example to work off of." If only he had those courses in Writing and was forced to write the papers and thesis' all the different types of writing assignments that college level courses make you grind through, he'd have the experience. He wonders why he'll need a class in Speech, when he just wants to be shut in a dark room, downing Mountain Dew like it is going out of style. Then when trying to do a presentation to a group or a conference, he'll wonder why people are loosing interest in what he's saying, or he'll wonder maybe there was a better way of arranging the material.
I never saw the value of many of the classes I took in college, while I was taking them. But between then and now, I've had projects and requests in which the experience and the things I learned in those classes came in handy. It's not to say I could live without them, but it sure made things easier that I already knew them at the time and didn't have to learn it at the drop of the hat, or that what I learned previously gave me a different perspective that allowed me to build a better system.
My 2cents, time learning something is time spent well.
Re:Don't get a CS degree (Score:2, Insightful)
I once read somewhere that the things you don't know become your Achilles heal. Very true.
In almost every project that people do in life, the biggest risk of failure comes from the unknown unknowns. These are the things that you didn't know, but that you didn't even realize that you didn't know. The known unknowns are straightforward to deal with. If I decide to start a business, I know that I know nothing about business tax issues, but since I am aware of that I can consult experts and educate myself. One of the benefits of general education is that you make your set of unknown unknowns smaller and the space of known unknowns bigger.
speaking as a hiring manager... (Score:2, Insightful)
I see an attitude problem that would make you a very risky hire. I also see a person who doesn't know enough about any application area to be able to understand customer requirements. I also see a boring jerk that is no fun to go to lunch with, because he can't discuss music, history, physics, economics, or politics. In the general flood of resumes, yours is one of the easier ones to dump in the circular file.
You don't know what you don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
The original poster, and you, who call it tack-on garbage, are the very reason that general education requirements are tacked on.
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
When I was studying artificial intelligence and computational vision for my post-grad degree, the stuff I learned most from was the shelf full of twentieth century philosophy books on logics, epistemology, and metaphysics (and Zen). binary-encoded symbols in computers representing things and processes out there in the world is a wondrous thing, and also a thing whose complexities are not easily mastered without a good grounding in philosophy. How can you know about the limitations of your representations - they ways they are sure to fail or become too complex or be challenged as limited or invalid - if you don't understand philosophy?
And I've come to understand how much of peoples' understanding of the world and themselves is in narrative form, and what the significance is of what is left in, and what is left out of a "good" narrative, and how narrative is fundamentally about the guiding of attention and the selection of the sub-situations salient to humans' concerns and needs. Some of that knowledge has come through a lot of careful consideration of great stories in several forms of art and literature.
All of it is central to a conception of how to do good user interface in computing.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading, writing are for communication. After a couple of decades in electronics and engineering development I can tell you the engineering documents written by illiterates are a major source of rework, specification missed targets and general mayhem over the years. Engineers have to be able to read and write, communicate with both words and math and make things work on paper even if they brass-board before producing initial prototypes. Some of this is because producing a single wafer worth of parts just for testing can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. I spent a lot of time as an engineering technician editing and cleaning up engineering information documents used by other engineers who's work was supposed to interface with what the first engineer was building. Documentation had to be concise, clear and accurate. I also ended up reading the IC data sheets to them when their brass-boards didn't work quite right and it was usually missed because they were just too busy.
Re:US-only problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you meet an American who never went to college, you can't consider him "educated" at all. We have to go to college just to have a modicum of education.
You, sir, are so far off base it's not even funny. One could just as well say, "If you meet an American with a college degree, you can assume that he or she is a pompous, egotistical jackass." While certainly true in some cases, it's not an accurate generalization and would be a stupid thing to say.
If you meet an American who actually studied and applied him or herself during high school, he or she will be reasonably well "educated", whatever that means. Not all American public schools are pathetic, and some are quite good. As with most things, the education you get depends on how much effort you put forth. There are plenty of us without college degrees who are not exactly the knuckle-dragging morons you seem to think.
Re:US-only problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it is US only and I *really* don't think it is a problem. Where I did my B.Sc. getting a degree meant you had to have a certain number of credit hours and a certain number of those had to be in 3rd & 4th year courses of your "Major", e.g. in CS. People also routinely earned "Minors" in one or two other subjects along the way by accumulating enough upper level credits in those areas. So you might get a major in CS with a minor in Physics (more likely the other way around though). If you wanted an "Hon" attached to your B.Sc. or B.A. you had to take additional upper level credits.
But you were also expected to get a certain number of "arts" credits if you were a science student and a certain number of science credits if you were an "arts" student. And I think that is a good idea.
For those saying they "got all that" in high school - there is just no comparing a university level English course and a high school English course.
Public universities are subsidized with public funds which gives the public a right to some say in what students have to take. I think it is not only reasonable but desirable for Science students to also have to take some English, History, Philosophy etc. and the equivalent requirements for Arts students to take Science courses.
I want the people working on recombinant DNA, drugs, power technologies, information processing etc. to be equipped to consider the social ramifications of their work and to understand, for example, why they can't just invent something and then disclaim any responsibility for what is then done with it.
Similarly I want the people who end up running society - the judges, politicians, etc. - to have a good understanding of "Science" and how it works and especially how it doesn't work.
IMHO not only doesn't High School achieve that as it usually seems to run but it can't achieve that goal as it is currently constituted. Heck in my experience high school doesn't even teach the science students the "science stuff" they need to succeed in University let alone the non "science stuff" as well.
As a final note, when I taught I met lots of students who didn't want to have to take any more of "that other stuff" and in most cases they were the ones who really needed it the most.
Re:You don't know what you don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly both of you can't even conceive why studying, for example, literature and philosophy might be useful to the practice of top-level computer science or software engineering. Therefore you clearly need to come out of your tunnel and be exposed to the world.
While I agree with the sentiment University is not the place to force people to be exposed to subjects they may have no interest in. This should be done at school and then at University the option to have a broader education should be available but NOT required. As I said above, at University you have to take more responsibility for your learning and be more self-motivated this means not having courses forced on you unless they are subject related and giving students the choice (which is the flipside of responsibility). So if you want to take archaelology or philosphy then the opportunity should be there but not the obligation.
Your example about philsophy illustrates the point. Clearly you wanted to do it and enjoyed it. However it is hardly a requirement for CS: otherwise it would be part of the CS course program like calculus. The same goes for courses like english. All scientists need to be able to write clearly and concisely but this is something which should be taught at school, not university, in the same way that those doing english degrees learn basic maths skills at school.
Re:US-only problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
The author says he's been programming since he was 13.
If that's the case, then he needs "English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like" more than he needs a CS degree.
If he's doing it all just to be able to get a job, then he needs "English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like" most of all.
I wish him luck, too.