[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
