Is the first year of a degree a waste of time?

Re:Is the first year of a degree a waste of time? by andrewingram on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @06:04PM (#1866724)

Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: - A basic mathematics course, took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more advanced things - Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. - An introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze - A basic hardware and lower-level concepts course - Data structures, ie what ones are available and their efficiencies - A unix programming module, basically we made some dead simple command line programs - Some functional programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

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Re:Is the first year of a degree a waste of time? by ecaroth on Friday November 05, 2010 @11:12AM (#1873445)

Wow... you were already in discreet math & shell programming in your first year. I was stuck with calc 1 & 2, and didn't get to touch a unix shell until my second year "networking" class where we spent two months setting up subnets. I didn't get to touch on any harware stuff until year 3, where we mapped out ALUs, RAM chips, etc. Sounds like your universities CS program had it's shit together a little more than mine. Oh well though.. the lack of interesting topics for the first 2 years only drove me to learn on my own and do side projects, which ended up ok in the end.

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