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Comp Sci Programs at Junior Colleges?
An anonymous reader asks: "What place does a Computer Science Department play in a Community College? I recently started taking classes out of an interest in learning new things and getting a few college credits toward my first degree. I come to find out (only 1 semester after I started) that none of these credits will transfer to a bachelor's degree at one of our state schools. Many of the courses here are 'applied technology' such as Linux Administration/Installation or Web programming with PHP, but the local University only accepts their own 'theory based' courses such as Data Structures, Theory of operating systems, and so forth. I was wondering where a community college fits in, has anyone seen a great community college program recently and if anyone knows how these programs are designed?"
I can't imagine a community college computer science cirriculum of any kind. One of the first computer science courses you have to take is Discrete Math, covering basic boolean logic and set theory, and the university students I was with whined enough as it is; I suspect a community college would simply revolt.
...?), but that'll be it. Of course you can find tons of courses that transfer to non-CS requirements, but I assume you knew that.
Computer science is simply too hard and too specialized to fit into a "community college", and any community college teaching it is either out of its league and something you should stay well away from, or trying to transition away from "community college" to true University. I don't know if that ever happens, but it sounds plausible.
If you're lucky they may have one course that transfers, maybe two (intro to C++ and
Of course, if you don't want to learn math, no sarcasm, stay where you are. If you're another person who's like, "Why should I learn more math, it's never useful anyways?", and you don't have any kind of open mind about the possibility of being wrong, then you are where you belong, again, no sarcasm. Personally, I find computer science courses highly and directly relevant to programming, especially programming in a high-powered and very abstract and useful way, but I am distinctly in the minority.
(And even so, a lot of it can be learned outside of school, though you will still miss a lot unless you have a lot of discipline... I've yet to meet someone online who truly grasps the computational complexity of algorithms who didn't learn some of it in school, for instance, though I've seen a lot of people who think they do but prove they don't within two or three sentences..)