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Note: current GT student, going to comment on some thoughts on this article: - Siloization of industries is a problem in general because it causes people to th

Note: current GT student, going to comment on some thoughts on this article: - Siloization of industries is a problem in general because it causes people to think dogmatically. Isbell makes a fair point, and it's more of a societal problem than a computing specific problem. My intuition is that if medical school students memorize Anki decks, they're going to be good at pattern matching but not seeing the big picture and why things happen. People react poorly to being challenged, responding with either aggression or avoidance. Rarely do they ask themselves why something is the case. Business people might know how to increase revenue but not understand what money is, how it is created and destroyed, and how it affects people's incentives. - I'm not sure the computing ethos is taught particularly well in schools. For example, the Unix Philosophy for writing command line tools or GNU's free software. In my view, colleges should be an fast feedback learning environment with significant input from teachers, fundamental readings, and exposure to new things to point people in the right direction. - Philosophy, math, and CS are a strong combination that go well together. I'm not surprised the author found himself at home in it. - I don't worry that people get into CS and care only about machines. I worry that people are getting into CS only for the money, leading to the enshittification of everything. The problem is the moral values of society as a whole. --- Fundamentally, Georgia Tech as a school strikes me as an industrial research/engineering powerhouse funded by federal grants, a major workforce contributor to F500 companies, and at its core a public school with the attitude and values students at public schools often have such as anti-intellectualism, which is promoted and visible in the administration and can be seen in how Georgia Tech changed its logo from a more academic, serious logo to an unserious logo. But this is a growing problem at universities everywhere across the US. Housing shortages, university degree oversupply, and so on. The weakness in its CS curriculum is actually its threads, causing a lack of breadth. By focusing on a thread such as "People/Media," they can pick classes that don't even touch fundamental aspects of computing such as databases, networking, compilers, programming languages, and so on. Apparently CS is switching to a direct admit method to stop the 500-600 person classes I've had for almost the entirety of college. I did have classes that focused on interesting topics such as law, differential privacy, cross-border data flows, philosophy and cognition, and so on. Particular classes I enjoyed were taught by teachers such as Galil, Swire, and Verma, where I felt the class content was serious, but this might also mirror my changing tastes in how education should be done as I get older. The harder and more serious the content and reading in a class is, the easier it actually is. And there's also a big maturity and understanding change that happens as well, which I don't really think is changeable.

kaiwenwang 3y ago
Some other thoughts: I'm not sure exactly how the future of GT will fare being a public school. A large reason for the lead was how early the school established the College of Computing. Will private schools end up a better place to study CS due to their smaller class sizes and less variance in the student population? I can't say for sure due to not personally knowing what studying at those private schools is like, but I think large lecture halls are ineffectual as a continued method of higher education. Another phenomenon is the amount of international students who come to the USA and are so focused on the idea and prestige of working for "Big Tech." Then they get there and find out how expensive the rent is, how expensive college was, and they spent all their time doing leetcode (which actually has some interesting fundamentals if you get really into it, it's not my thing personally though) and now graduate and think: now what?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > being a public school Fairly strong. There are DoD and DoE requirements that bias in favor of pushing R&D funding into Public Universities. GATech's early lead in computing was because of it's longstanding relationship with the US Navy's Nuclear and Aerospace Programs (both of which have significant HPC needs). It's a similar story at UCB, UIUC, UMich, UT Austin, UW, etc. Aside from MIT, Stanford, and Cornell, the bulk of DoE and DoD funding ends up at public universities. > private schools end up a better place to study CS due to their smaller class sizes and less variance I attended an Ivy Level CS program for undergrad. My sibling attended a Tier 1 public school program for CS. My sibling's CS education was superior, as the public university was able to hire way more faculty at better rates, as most decent public universities have multiple DoD and DoE universities and grantmakers to entice faculty and graduate students. If it isn't Stanford, Cornell, or MIT, I'd say the CS curriculum is middling at a private. I myself wish I attended GATech instead of my supposedly "prestigious" undergrad as the research and industrial opportunities at a Tier 1/2 Public CS program like a upper Tier UC, UW, GT, UIUC, etc are hard to beat almost anywhere. I think the main benefit an elite private school might have is a better support system, but by and large, the student base is largely comparable - if you're Berkeley EECS or UT Austin/UW direct CS you would have had stats comparable to a Stanford or MIT undergrad

kaiwenwang 3y ago

Some other thoughts: I'm not sure exactly how the future of GT will fare being a public school. A large reason for the lead was how early the school established the College of Computing. Will private schools end up a better place to study CS due to their smaller class sizes and less variance in the student population? I can't say for sure due to not personally knowing what studying at those private schools is like, but I think large lecture halls are ineffectual as a continued method of higher education. Another phenomenon is the amount of international students who come to the USA and are so focused on the idea and prestige of working for "Big Tech." Then they get there and find out how expensive the rent is, how expensive college was, and they spent all their time doing leetcode (which actually has some interesting fundamentals if you get really into it, it's not my thing personally though) and now graduate and think: now what?

alephnerd 3y ago
> being a public school Fairly strong. There are DoD and DoE requirements that bias in favor of pushing R&D funding into Public Universities. GATech's early lead in computing was because of it's longstanding relationship with the US Navy's Nuclear and Aerospace Programs (both of which have significant HPC needs). It's a similar story at UCB, UIUC, UMich, UT Austin, UW, etc. Aside from MIT, Stanford, and Cornell, the bulk of DoE and DoD funding ends up at public universities. > private schools end up a better place to study CS due to their smaller class sizes and less variance I attended an Ivy Level CS program for undergrad. My sibling attended a Tier 1 public school program for CS. My sibling's CS education was superior, as the public university was able to hire way more faculty at better rates, as most decent public universities have multiple DoD and DoE universities and grantmakers to entice faculty and graduate students. If it isn't Stanford, Cornell, or MIT, I'd say the CS curriculum is middling at a private. I myself wish I attended GATech instead of my supposedly "prestigious" undergrad as the research and industrial opportunities at a Tier 1/2 Public CS program like a upper Tier UC, UW, GT, UIUC, etc are hard to beat almost anywhere. I think the main benefit an elite private school might have is a better support system, but by and large, the student base is largely comparable - if you're Berkeley EECS or UT Austin/UW direct CS you would have had stats comparable to a Stanford or MIT undergrad