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I have attended both UT Austin and Texas A&M, who both proudly and decidedly adhere to opposing views. UT places CS under the Natural Sciences, and indeed I ha
by gatlin 16y ago
I have attended both UT Austin and Texas A&M, who both proudly and decidedly adhere to opposing views.
UT places CS under the Natural Sciences, and indeed I have spent the lion's share of my 3 years here studying algorithms, discrete math, and numerous levels of predicate logic.
At A&M, however, the focus was on engineering robust software, using theory where applicable (straight from Dr Stroustrup's mouth during a lecture, actually, and his views were widely accepted among the faculty I spoke with). CS is under the Engineering School there, and they felt that was where it belongs.
I think part of the issues is semantics. A&M CS is not known as a prestigious department, but their engineering college as a whole is; they might see it as an admission of inferiority to be "merely" the practical side of things. However, what they do is not inferior (even if it's not what I want to study): it's the other side of the coin, but they want the department to be just as well known so they use an improper term to catch attention. I think they have a great opportunity here to differentiate their offerings and start the trend if they would just call it the Department of Software Engineering to complement their well-known Petroleum, Electrical, Computer, Nuclear, Mechanical, Civic, etc offerings.
[edit: apologies for poor articulation and verbosity. resolved wontfix].
- elbenshira 16y agoI'm studying at UT Austin, and I love all the theory work. It's challenging and makes my brain hurts, but the insights you get out of all this work changes the way you see programming and software engineering. You start yearning for beauty and elegancy, much like the algorithms we study. You find that you start thinking like a theorist in your every-day coding: what am I trying to solve? What are the constraints? How do all the pieces work together? Do I need this piece over here? Some theory may not be practical, but learning to think the way theorists think is very, very practical. And a lot of fun.
- gatlin 16y agoAgreed. Hence my transfer ;) But I do respect what TAMU is attempting.
- crs 16y agoI always find it interesting how two people can have completely different experiences from the same school. I earned my CS degree at TAMU, and I only had one real SE class. It was aptly named "Software Engineering". Everything else was still theory, Algorithms, Formal Languages and Automata, AI, Programming Languages, etc. I graduated in 02, so not sure how things have changed since then. I did notice they changed the Dept name. That all said, I do believe some software engineering concepts should be taught as part of the CS degree. If you do go work for a large engineering company (Boeing for me), then being exposed to different development processes is helpful. However I can't say this enough, at least here at a large company, you can see a difference between someone with a solid understanding of cs theory and someone that does not.