Slashdot Mirror
How Important is a Well-Known CS Degree?
syynnapse asks: "I've been interested in computer science since my mother taught me how to program in QBASIC when I was eleven, and I've wanted to be a developer ever since I learned C++ in AP Computer Science while in high-school. Now I'm in my sophomore year of college studying CS at a state university that isn't particularly known for its CS program, but I'm quite happy and personally think I'm learning plenty. My father thinks otherwise, and the deadline for transferring successfully is approaching quickly. What chance do I have in the real world with a not-so-prestigious degree? Am I likely to be learning what's important? Am I looking at a series of awful jobs if I don't transfer?"
They make Counter-Strike Degrees? sign me up!
this allowed me to get a job at the best convenience store in the state. Highly recommended!
You can learn a lot and have a challenging career in Medicine. You need an advanced degree to practice medicine.
You can pick up all the skills you need in computers by working hard at a paying job. You don't need a degree.
You're right. Which is why joining the military is a good start to your occupation. It looks great on resumes, and you get lots of training. Not to mention, they pay for college.
Most people that enter the military make much more than the average person, when they leave and enter the private sector.
I heard the section on crate-bashing at MIT proves to be quite handy in the real world. Maybe that's what you're talking about.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Are you trolling or just fucking retarded? He wants to have a career, not a front-seat ticket to the apocalypse. If he stays in school, he has a much better shot at getting into one of those cozy radiological bunkers with canned food and all the recycled urine you can drink.
Indeed, it is most definitely what you know that counts.
I hear the spelling program is not so hot though.
You mis-spelled if. HTH
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Ooooo! Cliff, you have been served!
A good university will teach computer science, and expect you to work out how to write code on your own; a bad university will teach you how to program, and not even admit that there is anything more to learn.
Well, in a better constructed reality, a good university would teach *both*. I taught myself to program when I was in my teens (Atari BASIC!), but I could have saved some grief early on by taking at least one course. They didn't teach programming in Junior High back then, though.
--- Ban humanity.
Yeah, everybody but the goons in "Human Resources" (you know the ones: they're the ones with degrees in Human Resources...)
Then it will be my chance to be the clueless boss who assigns impossible projects without any clear objective, reasonable timeline, or decent support.
Sounds great, when are you hiring?
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Whatever you do, stay in school.
Do you want to be successful like John Smith? How about Robert Jimmyjoiner? Sam Francisco? Well you better stay in school. You'll go nowhere fast without a degree because that piece of paper validates you and determines your worth as a human being.
If you drop out you are destined to become a small time failure, keeping company with such delinquents as Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and some other guys you've never heard of.
Don't be Bill Gates- stay in school.