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The biggest suggestion I can give to students in CS is to find a focus (like this link was Security). Without that, after graduating with your Bachelor degree,
by tsumnia 13y ago
The biggest suggestion I can give to students in CS is to find a focus (like this link was Security). Without that, after graduating with your Bachelor degree, you won't have a specific interest. If its academic and you're really interested in neural networks, awesome, latch onto a professor with that focus and never let go; if its more outside the box like audio manipulation (as one of my colleagues did), go crazy and join a community with that focus.
I personally went for my Master degree because I really didn't feel like I'd found a purpose to my CS degree. I KNEW programming, but had nothing driving me. After grad school and a startup, I now know my interests are embedded systems and image manipulation.
- jmspring 13y agoI'd just add take a few classes outside your chosen field (and required courses) in an area of secondary interest. You get acquainted with different people, get a different perspective, etc. My main undergrad was actually originally BioChem, which I flipped over to straight Chemistry and added Computer Engineering because it was easy. I never worked in the Chemistry field. I threw in Lit and Politics classes (upper div/grad level) just to meet and discuss different topics with different groups of people. All too often if you pick an impacted degree, need to take lots of the same classes with the same people, and are spending all your time on that subject you will miss out.
- tsumnia 13y agoI almost suggest having a different interest and taking CS courses to compliment it. CS is generic enough that without something else that you can use it on, it seems pretty bland.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hendzen 13y agoI agree. Having a concentration in a subfield (Distributed Systems, AI, Security, etc) gives you the ability to read papers (both classics and new research) in that field and have the ability to stay current with new ideas & techniques.