Re: A bit of advice re University and such is requested

"H. S. Teoh" wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2000 at 11:20:17PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> [snip]
> > At Cornell at least, the workload for CS and double-E are pretty
> > stiff...mainly because you *can't* predict debugging time.  Or at least I
> > never could.  Plays hob with any attempts to budget time.  :-/
> [snip]
>
> Advice from a CS graduate: If you want to take CS, be prepared to spend
> *indefinite* amounts of time on design/coding/debugging. Especially
> debugging, as Yoon points out here. It's not that programming assignments
> are hard; it's just that you need to spend a lot of *time* on it. Even the
> easiest mistake (like missing a semicolon in C, which traditionally causes
> cryptic errors that gives absolutely no clue that the missing semicolon is
> the cause of your woes) can take several hours to locate. I know this has
> happened to me more often than I'd like to admit :-)
>
> You just need to allocate like twice or thrice the amount of time you
> *think* you need for programming assignments. 'Cos almost always, you'll
> end up taking more time than you expected. Not because it's hard -- often,
> you can quite easily figure out what needs to be done; the problem is that
> sometimes simple problems take a long time to locate, and unexpected
> things have a bad habit of creeping up just before the assignment due
> date. :-)
>
> CS theory courses are a different can 'o worms, though. In general I'd
> say, pay a LOT of attention to required 1st/2nd year math courses. They
> are required for a reason -- you won't survive upper year theory courses
> unless you make sure you understand the math stuff in 1st/2nd year,
> tempting though it is to disregard them. Of course, IMNSHO upper year CS
> theory courses belong more in the math dept than CS, but that's another
> story... :-)
>
Thanks for the advice. It's always good to know these things.

--
Robert