I've always felt that a CS degree (at least based on the curriculum I went through) is really three separate and only partly related areas of study crammed toge

I've always felt that a CS degree (at least based on the curriculum I went through) is really three separate and only partly related areas of study crammed together: - Teaching people how to program for the first time. Most of us had never actually programmed before, so you've got to have the intro classes that both teach _how_ to think through breaking a problem down into steps, and also the specific syntax of expressing those steps in a specific programming language, moving on to the typical concepts like OOP and classes and whatnot. - Actual CS. Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compilers, and the various more math-ish / "fundamentals" content. - Software Engineering. The practical, hands-on work of actually writing meaningful code, working as part of a team, requirements, using version control, testing, etc. Some classes like specific web dev topics or something probably fit into here too. Granted, I was going through this almost 20 years ago, and I only have my own experience to base this on, but it seems like this is a reasonable broad description of what a CS degree is trying to cover. I feel like that gave me a good fundamental background, but at the same time 99% of what I do on a daily basis now is all stuff that I either learned on the job, or in my own free time.