Computer Science degrees
It’s the first week of a new semester and I’ve been looking over the syllabus for my Applied Calculus class. I hate to say it this soon, but this is one of the few classes that will hurt my GPA. Right now I have a 3.79 with 7 classes left to complete my BS in Computer Science, and the 3 classes I failed to earn an A in were the 3 classes I have taken from the math department. My other classes this semester are Technical Communications and Windows Administration, so they shouldn’t be so bad. The communications class will be all busy work, and the Windows Admin class is a total blow off class since it will teach me to do the job I’ve been doing for the last 6 years. I need the credit hours to meet my electives requirements, so whatever it takes.
Speaking of a CS degree, it isn’t worth as much now as it was in 2000 when I started. Someone at work told me the other day that I should have taken MIS instead since I would have been able to take more business classes that would be more useful. I couldn’t disagree more, but I think this mentality is fairly strong in mega-corporations with emphasis being put hiring people with business related knowledge and offshoring the coding tasks. I have taken several classes that I would not have wanted to miss. My algorithms class taught me a how to evaluate ways of solving problems and figuring out the performance characteristics of different approaches, and my operating systems class gave me experience in creating multithreaded apps and guarding against deadlocks. All things a MIS major would have missed.
A couple semesters ago I wrote a research paper on the outsourcing trend, which is posted here.