Yeah - I did a CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s and it was 4 years of maths & CS stuff - pretty focused.
Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.
I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.
Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.
Would love to take a look at the courses in that degree. That's my main hangup, I have such a thirst to learn college level compsci (not how to code but algorithms, theories,etc...) and crypto but spending two years writing english essays and philosophy presentations is no bueno.
I did a CS degree at a UK university in the early 2000s and we were forced to take two modules of non-CS in the first year. Due to the ridiculous way places were allocated (you literally had a single day in which to physically run around the university town trying to visit the offices and find courses with space), I ended up doing history and archaeology.
Mostly, this reinforced the general impression that these subjects were extremely easy and involved next to no work, compared to CS. It didn't help me much in later life though.
arethuza|3 years ago
Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.
I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.
Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.
badrabbit|3 years ago
native_samples|3 years ago
Mostly, this reinforced the general impression that these subjects were extremely easy and involved next to no work, compared to CS. It didn't help me much in later life though.