Did any of you guys that majored in CS completed an AP course for it and took a test in high school? At first i thought it was a good idea but then my CS teacher said it was not worth it because the class you go into once you go into college will be a continuation of the first. She said that we were still going to take it for the credits though, but do any of you guys have an experience in this?

I got to skip the introductory courses for CompSci at UC Irvine because I took the AP test. Not much other benefit to this though afaik.

As for my own compsci degree, went through it and found out i favored IT more than CS so I'm looking into DB certifications now...

I was debating over that as well. What is CE exactly? How much different is it from CS?

U of I at urbana (in state) and Purdue University. And a few "safety" schools like UIC in case I don't make it to the 2 universities said earlier.

CS is still an engineering major or at least where I went to school.

Normally you can choose whether or not to take more or less theoretical classes. Plenty of classes also are a mix of them. All depends on the school. You really can't say the work load will be huge for every school.

Basically you're expecting your bias to be the norm, but it's really different depending on the school.

It depends on the school. It's usually lumped in with engineering or science. My school has it separated into its own college, which is nice.

I got a 5 on the AP Computer Science test, which got me out of the class "Elements of Computing" which was the first CSCI class at my school.

Basically, you're using your high school time to get a class out of the way for college, which is a really great idea because
1. anything else you'd do in high school is probably less valuable than AP Comp Sci if you're going to major in Comp Sci
2. by taking your first formal programming class earlier, you're opening the doors for independent learning and projects a year earlier

Worst case scenario, you don't score high enough on the AP test, and have a knowledge head start when you retake it in college.

I don't know exactly what they did in Elements of Computing, but when I took Computer Science 1, I was fully prepared.

CE and CS were separate at Rutgers.

CE gets you some electrical and hardware learning and is generally more open.

CS to me means specifically only coding.

I definitely think the title of 'engineer' outweighs the title of 'scientist' post grad though as far as job searching.

but flame im a software engineer with a computer science degree!

like I said I can only speak from my experience at the TU Berlin and from what I heard from other Universities in Europe.

i have had a lot more opportunities outside of software doe.

I would say CS is more theoretical and CE is more practical. It's kinda like the relationship between physics and engineering in general, but the CS job market just happens to be a lot bigger.

i had a friend say CE is like CS + electrical engineering type stuff. and they have like the same job opportunities only CE has more. i have no idea how much truth there is to any of that i guess

yeah I am in a bit of a dilemma as well... wanna major in CS but horrendous at math.

nothing else seems interesting too me...what do

When I was doing some research about CS, CE and SE, it seems like in terms of job opportunities, CS and SE degrees overlap each other, so you can't really go wrong with either major. With a CE degree, though, you possibly need more of that engineering aspect with experience and schooling, so it doesn't overlap as much if you have a CS or SE degree? Is that how it works? or is like how alec said?

From what I've seen from my school, CS and SE overlap each other in the later years but CS is more focused on the algorithms, databases and more math/theory. SE places a stronger emphasis on the overall process of software development and programming. CE includes some circuits + hardware courses along with some software.

You'll learn one thing and lose out on another due to time restrictions. (If you're doing circuits and hardware courses you might not take some heavy math courses and vice versa)
They'll all respectable programs, choose what you want.

CS is an automatic minor for math a lot of the times. You just have to declare it. I'm majoring in CS and Math, and minoring in German. :)

CS is not worth taking if you can't get into a good university. Mediocre universities will teach you how to use specific languages and operating systems. This knowledge will make interviewers at bad companies happy, but you'll hate yourself working a job like that and more importantly, you can learn it yourself.

Want to learn to program? Download Sourcemod and start writing silly TF2 plugins. Want to learn Linux? Install an interesting distro (CRUX, gentoo, arch is decent, not ubuntu...) and use it. Make sure you actually use it, not in a VM (installing in a VM for practice is good though) or dual-booting into Windows 90% of the time.

Good universities will teach you the science. They will assume you can already write code and if you can't you will be expected to learn it, by yourself, very quickly. The languages used in the course will be whatever the lecturer that year likes the most (mine used Haskell, Scala, Java, OcaML, C, C++, PHP, CUDA, ...). They will teach you material that can be applied to every language including the half dozen that you will create, every OS and every job. When you apply to a good company, they will test your knowledge of this material, and not the Java standard library or the arguments to ls.

If you aren't able to get into a top university for CS but you still want to be a programmer, apply to something else (biology, chemistry, maths, etc) and learn to program in your own time. You can use your programming ability to differentiate yourself from everyone elseG and you won't feel like you're wasting your time.

For the curious, I can answer questions both here and in private based on my experience studying in the UK.

edit: don't take software engineering unless you already self harm

Here in Portugal there is really no difference between CS and Computer Engineering, actually 90% of the degrees use the engineering denomination, in a couple universities they call it computer science but its basically the same thing as computer engineering.
I know the CS denomination is much more prevalent in the US but here is the other way around.

I think this is wrong. At least around here, they teach you from the ground up, starting from the very basic in any new class. You're not expected to know how to code already, but it certainly helps if you do.

Engineering school generally focuses on making you learn how to think. Even at my current job there are people with PhDs and graduate degrees who can't properly use Google search keywords.

If there's one thing engineering school taught me it's how to work with no sleep, how to pass tests without going hard on studying, how to meet deadlines, and how to balance having little to no 'free' time yet still finding time for exercise, friends, etc.

I'm not trying to knock or downtalk CS because it is definitely a reputable degree and the coursework is definitely worthwhile but when I graduated I had very minimal experience coding, told myself I'd never software develop/code for a career and had no drive to learn. Then when I graduated I got a job for the DOD doing logistics engineering and now 2 years later I'm a developer at a telecommunications company making pretty good money as a software dev despite having legitimately minimal experience ever coding.

I didnt even suck any d's or know anyone at this company but I will also say when you're at school focus on networking with people even if they're shitheads if they have connections. Knowing people is generally more rewarded than knowing 'things' and if you can become friends with the right people it'll make your job searching down the road a lot easier. I got my DoD job through a connection and then this company hired me just because I had gov't experience even though I had 0 exp doing software work.

I'm still gonna back the CE over CS though. CE you can go into a lot of different fields (business,engineering,electronics,software) where I feel like CS limits you to software generally. Also the quality of people you meet in engineering is probably also more rewarding in the long run than the CS dept. For example if you're friends with the smartest kid in engineering it'll probably have better outcome networking wise than the smartest kid in CS.

That's just my opinion though, and my experience.

I graduated in '12 in CE.

flame picked medusa 8 times in a row last night

CS > CE

went 8 for 10.
road to 5k

Engineering taught me 'dont fix what isnt broken'

Engineering > Science

You shouldn't drop out of a CS program or you'll become a computer janitor like me

didn't you tell me you make dope cash for minimal effort though

Enough to live comfortably on, but it took me a while to realize I could've been making a killing had I stuck with it.

but minimal effort :(

Everything that Brownymaster, Flame, and mikejs is saying is true, despite the contradictions. Software is a HUGE landscape and every company, market, and subdiscipline of engineering will look at your resume differently.

Flame and I were in the same program at Rutgers and were pretty much roommates. I took a slightly different path since I didn't graduate. We're both "software engineers" now...but I doubt we'd be able to get a job at each others' companies.

As for the CompSci vs CompEng thing:
Flame is adamant about this because the CS program at Rutgers was a joke. I don't know how it is at other state schools but it's probably similar. Keep in mind that switching your major from CompEng to CompSci should be pretty painless...you won't lose anything by trying.

If you go to a top school like Stanford/Waterloo however, you should be set with any technical degree really.

Yeah, you can work in virtually any market in some capacity, and I think that's relatively unique to this field and an understated advantage.

Jobs pay well, offer amazing perks, and are really easy to get. Companies actively recruit you because there are massive shortages of people with computer skills, and that gap is projected to increase dramatically in the next decade.

In terms of CS vs. CE, my degree is actually Computer Science and Engineering :) My more CE-focused classes tended to include some electrical engineering and hardware topics - I think of that as everything from circuits and signals to somewhere around assembly language. CS is more software and algorithms, but solid software development definitely requires an engineering mindset.

If you do any engineering or science field, you will need to learn a lot of math. CS is more discrete math, EE/CE are more calc/differential equations. Life is easier when you learn your math regardless of what field you go into.

I also want to caution that taking an intro programming class is not a good measure of whether you'll like the field, or even programming. Most intro classes make problem sets have clean inputs and just work. The real world is full of messy data.

Additionally, while I think CS is an excellent career path and I probably wouldn't do things differently, it can (and will, if you're doing it "right") be a grueling process that can make you hate your life. Interviews will frequently ask you to talk about projects you do in your "spare time." There's an expectation (that's slowly changing) that when you're done with your CS schoolwork (lol), you turn around and do...more CS! In most other science/engineering fields, having research on the side for a few semesters is a major perk. That disregard for personal time can also extend to the workplace - but as I said, you can do almost anything with a CS degree.

This concept of "always be hacking" has infested the mindset of impressionable CS students who think that the most important thing in life is an unbroken string of Github commits. A lot of big companies ask you this as a screening question, but if you're a good candidate the majority of the time they don't care. I've impressed just as many recruiters with my music-related extracurricular hobbies. They just want to see that you're passionate about something.

Well here's the deal, I don't want to hire people who are disengaged at work, don't try to constantly improve their skills, and just show up in order to earn a paycheck.

Side projects are an easy way to show me that you care about software engineering and you treat it as a craft as well as a living. Which makes it much more fun to work with you.

A lack of a portfolio isn't a dealbreaker, and I certainly don't hold it against candidates who have impressive resumes otherwise. But if all you have is a B.S. and an internship...even you probably don't know if you love software engineering or not.

This is easy for people who don't go to MIT ;)