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Re:A hacker's guide to college by danielhfrank on Thursday August 25, 2011 @03:39PM (#2926115)
Forgive the nitpicking, but I think you misread him slightly. He wrote "Take only classes you're interested in", not classes you enjoy. I did many of the things that Dave suggested (BA in Math, very few required classes for that one), and definitely lived by that policy. A prime example was that I never took a class just because it was a pre-req for another class that I wanted to take. There were some really hard classes that I did not enjoy doing the work for, but I had signed up because they covered interesting topics, and for the most part I was glad to have completed them.

As I said, I pretty much followed Dave's advice on course selection, not because I didn't think CS was necessary, but because I didn't yet know I wanted to do development. There are some things I feel I missed (like learning how a computer actually works), but on the whole the most useful programming skills I've gained are ones I've learned on the job or hacking on my own projects in the middle of the night.

Re:A hacker's guide to college by davidbalbert on Thursday August 25, 2011 @03:54PM (#2926168)
This was exactly what I was getting at. I found that I didn't learn a lot in the classes that I wasn't interested in.
Re:A hacker's guide to college by timsally on Thursday August 25, 2011 @07:41PM (#2926819)
Ah, fair enough! Sorry for the misread.