NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

SyAD at aol.com wrote:
> David, I'm shocked that a CS MS would require anything outside of the 
> field, that seems very odd to me.  Maybe things have changed since the 
> *cough, cough* years since I got my Bachelor's, but even when I was 
> getting my Bachelor's (Mechanics and Materials Science, essentially 
> Mechanical Engineering, from Hopkins), the non-major requirements 
> (credits for liberal arts, natural science, etc) were down around 20 
> credits or less, and if you were clever, you could find courses that 
> were useful.  The liberal arts requirement as I remember consisted of 
> one year-long course -- I took Russian for that.

And that is my point. As mentioned in other emails, the BSEE program I 
randomly picked as it was one of the top results from Google asked for a total 
of 132 credits and from those 60 credits that were basically labeled as 
non-major courses, so that is about half of all course work required. I know 
that this differs from school to school, but as mentioned I attended a 
university that asked for 150 credits on-major course work, yet I got the same 
BSEE degree. But am I that wrong in thinking that I got a better engineering 
education?
In the MS program things were mainly on-topic, but for a good part on such a 
basic level that I wondered if I registered for the right course. I epxected 
it to be intelectually challanging, not just a lot of work. One course was 
about e-business, the book was of horrible quality and the course wasn't much 
better. The recurring task was to read 50 pages and then write a ten page 
paper about it. And that week after week. We did have to do a project as well 
and I did a PHP script that took entries from an HTML form and writes them to 
a file. The script and pages were for submitting support tickets for software. 
I never created an HTML page before nor did I have any good relation with 
programming. I came to the conclusion that programming hates me and that I 
hate programming, which is why I chose to do a programming project. That was 
the only tough task in that course and only because I chose to make it difficult.
My impression was that the department wanted to make the courses easy and 
fluffy on purpose so that many students pass and graduate, which boosts the 
numbers on paper and makes the university look good.

> On the other hand, in-major course requirements weren't that onerous 
> either, so I could take Electrical Engineering, Economics and Math 
> Sciences (Optimization, Stats) to, in a sense, design my own major.

One other thing I find silly is the constant hand holding at US universities 
with advisors and mandatory meetings. I found that to be disturbing that the 
school considers me to be that limited in my capabilities to sign up for the 
mandatory courses and pick from those that are in the "Other" bucket. Once 
done I register for the thesis and at that point someone checks if I passed 
all the required course work. I found that having an advisor assigned to me 
was make work for both me and her.
So did you end up designing your major or did you have to sit down with 
someone for hours debating why this course is better than that course?


> It's funny, even though I've been doing analysis/design/programming for 
> all these years, I took very little CS.

Well, the only written warning in high school due to bad grades that I ever 
got was for English. Fast forward a few years and I got hired as technical 
writer at a US research foundation. I guess we each picked up what we needed 
at some other place.

David