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?"
By the end, the Gen Ed was the best! (Score:3, Interesting)
I finished off my degree while working full-time as a kernel engineer. By the last year, the Gen Ed classes were the ones I looked forward to the most.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:2, Interesting)
You hit the nail on the head, regardless your career courses like that make you a better person at any job. In fact I work for a very large insurance company doing financial work, and we are being giving English and writing classes at work, so we can communicate better with customers and co-workers. In addition things like history and philosophy, make you a better person over all, and as there is much more to any job than walking through the door and walking into an office until you clock out companies want people who can think, reason, and interact with others.
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not CS, but somewhat feel like people that know programming they should get an immediate degree without learning the basics. Programming is probably only one course of the degree and to me, it's not all you need to know to become a CS.
Yes, it's expensive to go to school, but some people really underestimate what they can learn in school.
CS degree (Score:1, Interesting)
You should be applauded for wanting to get a CS degree. This will certainly affect the ways you look at computer programs in the future, and especially the programming part of it.
However, my opinion is that you should question the reasons as to why you doubt learning about, for example, English - since that might be exactly that thing that is most beneficial to you.
Allow me to explain by telling you my viewpoint of the story. I started a CS education 15 years ago, with the intention of only learning the computer-related courses in it. There were some courses in "communication" (in Swedish, since that's where I live), that I for the most part didn't like at the time. My view was that learning to write properly and to talk in front of people was a waste of time, since my focus was on creating the most brilliant programs ever created. The math and algorithm courses were more interesting at the time than the courses that got you well-informed of other areas.
However, once I got into my last year and started writing the thesis (for a company), I started seeing other priorities other than the programming itself. I saw people being percieved as bad programmers because they could not relay the intention of what their programs were doing, and I was seeing people being percieved as great programmers because they could get the whole team to start working in the same direction towards the same goal. My view is that being a great programmer is not only being able to write excellent programs, you also have to write the program the fulfills the correct purpose (and not just YOUR purpose).
I would argue that the ability to correctly convey your reasoning behind a design decision is equally as important as the ability to execute on that decision.
Getting back to your case, it seems that you have a proficiency at understanding programming, and learning new programming languages. That is absolutely a must in order to be a good developer/engineer, and you will have that advantage over other people probably for your whole life. The ability to quickly learn new areas is something you should treasure. However, I would encourage you to also learn communication skills, as that (in my experience) will help you equally as much.
Maybe that's just how it works where I live, but I guess it is applicable to other places as well.
You should question the reasons why you don't want to learn something about an area that is not as intuitive as computer programming to you.
That being said, I wish you all the luck in getting a CS degree, you have whole generations of programmers behind you that want you to succeed!
Re:No offense intended, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dan Bricklin didn't become super rich, but he literally changed the world. I saw a documentary once in which an accountant or some type of professional said that the first time he saw a computerized spreadsheet, he cried, because it took out so much drudgery it could make his work fun again.
If Bricklin had not been getting an MBA, would he have gotten the idea? I'm guessing he looked at hours of paper and pencil boredom recalculating cells, and realized that there was a better way to do it because of his computer background.
Moral: Bricklin's background in computer-science when coupled with exposure to an unrelated area, showed him a need and in the process, he changed the world.
Alternate Moral: If accountants and MBAs had stepped outside their study area and looked at computer-science, they could have changed the world themselves
Re:You underestimate the value (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who works at a large international company which works with many people from around the world, some of the least "educated" / skilled people I've worked with, have been American. When put next to, british, australian, french, and german engineers and accountants, even the ones who've come from fancy american universities, seem almost retarded in comparison. (I said engineers and accountants as they're the ones I primarily come into contact with)
While I wouldn't say everyone, but it's become a bit of a joke at our various head offices. We get candidates who have studied for 4-6 years (sometimes more), and yet it's almost like they've only done introductory courses.
Perhaps you should focus less on Gen-Ed, and more on your specialization, at university. Gen-Ed is to be done on top of your specialization, not as part of it.
Me thinks you're mistaking correlation for causation.
Re:Hah, good luck. (Score:2, Interesting)
The typical defenses of GenEd and the liberal arts always seem to exclude the opportunity cost of such education. Four years spent at university with half the time devoted away from this student's passion and career is a heavy opportunity cost.
These things may be enriching or useful in certain scopes, but is it really worth giving up the equivalent of two years and tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and/or lost earnings?
Put it this way - how many of us who were self-taught programmers would abandon our careers to go to school for a two year vacation in literature and art?
TMTOWTDI. If he wants to concentrate on his passion and spend his time and money acquiring skills directly and intensely relevant to his future as a super-coder, then let him. Other people soak up the "well rounded" experience and fill social roles where that background is necessary.
With modern society comes the need for ever increasing degrees of specialization. Decades ago a general EE degree was fairly comprehensive in use. Now people have to specialize or go all the way through graduate school to acquire the skills needed for the next generation of highly engineered hardware, and even then their skills are fairly focused in what they can work on. Likewise, a security conscious programmer has to know and use a body of material at least one order of magnitude larger than a decade ago. Parallelism in algorithms has exploded in recent years, leaving software developers starved for experts who can do it right and efficient in fully compiled code. A four year degree with two years spent outside of specialization doesn't cut it anymore unless the applicant is going in for entry level code grinding on monotonous low-hanging fruits of projects whose corporate culture is worthy of mockery by the likes of Office Space and Dilbert.
The real question should be whether it is useful to spend four years for a bachelor's rounded around the edges, or whether he should compress a master's level experience into a four year scope. If he wants to be a top programmer, go for the latter.
There is another factor at play: age. There are exceptions, but we all know that ageism is rampant in the most desirable tech companies. People wanting to be cutting edge and part of a development dream team better be young, aggressive, and perceived as part of the cutting edge generation. Delaying the start of a career by two years is not good in the long run for securing those positions. Good luck fitting into the culture a bleeding edge startup when you're middle age, married with kids and a house, and your resume is full of obsolete technology. Nine times out of ten that startup is going to hire the edgy 24 year old who ported Linux to his microwave oven in his spare time.
It's a problem with the American attitude. (Score:1, Interesting)
People from outside America probably can't comprehend the psychological differences between America and basically the rest of the world when it comes to education.
Americans are groomed from a young age to not give a damn about anything outside of America. At an individual level, this in turn encourages them not to give a damn about anything outside of their immediate lives.
Education is affected by this attitude. An individual will have a core interest, but anything outside of this narrow viewpoint will be considered a "waste of time". In many cases, the individual won't even like their core stream of study, but will just be doing it to get a degree to supposedly "get a good job and to get the money" later on (even if it puts them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no chance of earning that much back).
It's not limited to any field. Those who focus on English literature, for instance, will often go out of their way to avoid even the most basic math courses. This is unfortunate, as they'll need these basic math skills when making change at their future careers as baristas and cashiers.
The same goes for those who focus on Comp. Sci. They often avoid the most basic courses that involve the English language, thus never acquiring necessary skills like the ability to use capitalization and punctuation when writing.
Re:US-only problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
This illustrate a problem: People think that CS degree is a degree training programmers - they are simply wrong.
Which also illustrates an ongoing problem in many parts of the world. The believe that a degree, any degree, is necessary and an absolute requirement for a non-doctorate field.
Not to say that it is worthless, but why would a programmer need a degree? So they can start out life tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in debt?