Aries
12-01-2016, 05:19 AM
I guess it's time I came out of the closet and admit I do have a bachelors in computer science from an ivy league institution. I worked in the field as a programmer for a long time, before I decided I'd had enough of it and threw it all away to start an organic farm.
A lot of your questions can be answered by the department chair at the school you are interested in attending. If they are not directly accessible, then start at the admissions office and go from there.
I think your idea of more math is a good one. Stopping at algebra is way early in the math field. However, depending on what kind of programming you will eventually do, math may or may not be very relevant. I was involved in the very early stages of computer animation, so math was indeed very necessary.
What a CS degree really does is take you from being a hacker to being a real programmer. It teaches you how to elegantly structure a program so that it is easily modifiable and extensible. No program is ever really done, so you have to write in in such a way that other programmers long after you are gone can use your code and build upon it. Learning how to properly structure a program to anticipate future needs is a huge leap from doing a bit of database programming. You are graded based not on if the program spits out the right answer, but if the program spits out the right answer and is structured in an efficient and logical fashion that makes it easy to extend and improve without massively rewriting what you already wrote.
So back to math, for my CS degree I was not required to take math past calculus but I did do linear algebra and logic. I don't think I understood anything in my logic class at all, so I stopped math at that point and took more of the computer science curriculum. Math is needed but perhaps less than you are thinking.
Early computer science classes are designed to weed out a good percentage of the students so the faculty's workload in manageable. If you have group assignments choose your group members carefully.
I don't know how you could swing a full time job and a bachelor's degree. Maybe others can help there. I feel that programming is a young man's profession, and it wouldn't be long before you'd be promoted into a management position. So look at other course work at the school that would be applicable to management. Being organized, having the social and leadership skills to deal with a diverse team, learning how to manage other team members and get work done correctly and on time, that makes you a very desirable employee.
I have no knowledge of what CIS degree entails.
I probably didn't answer any of your questions, but maybe I gave you something to consider.
A lot of your questions can be answered by the department chair at the school you are interested in attending. If they are not directly accessible, then start at the admissions office and go from there.
I think your idea of more math is a good one. Stopping at algebra is way early in the math field. However, depending on what kind of programming you will eventually do, math may or may not be very relevant. I was involved in the very early stages of computer animation, so math was indeed very necessary.
What a CS degree really does is take you from being a hacker to being a real programmer. It teaches you how to elegantly structure a program so that it is easily modifiable and extensible. No program is ever really done, so you have to write in in such a way that other programmers long after you are gone can use your code and build upon it. Learning how to properly structure a program to anticipate future needs is a huge leap from doing a bit of database programming. You are graded based not on if the program spits out the right answer, but if the program spits out the right answer and is structured in an efficient and logical fashion that makes it easy to extend and improve without massively rewriting what you already wrote.
So back to math, for my CS degree I was not required to take math past calculus but I did do linear algebra and logic. I don't think I understood anything in my logic class at all, so I stopped math at that point and took more of the computer science curriculum. Math is needed but perhaps less than you are thinking.
Early computer science classes are designed to weed out a good percentage of the students so the faculty's workload in manageable. If you have group assignments choose your group members carefully.
I don't know how you could swing a full time job and a bachelor's degree. Maybe others can help there. I feel that programming is a young man's profession, and it wouldn't be long before you'd be promoted into a management position. So look at other course work at the school that would be applicable to management. Being organized, having the social and leadership skills to deal with a diverse team, learning how to manage other team members and get work done correctly and on time, that makes you a very desirable employee.
I have no knowledge of what CIS degree entails.
I probably didn't answer any of your questions, but maybe I gave you something to consider.
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