Computer Science: Lessons Learned
How to Succeed at a CS Education
The efforts made by Code.org and many others for students to learn computer science seem to be working as there has been an “Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science.” There is no doubt that we need more people with a computer science education as the demand for software engineers continues to vastly outpace the supply. But as you can read in these Reddit comments and based on my personal experience, computer science is very hard and attrition rates are often high. There were computer science classes I took at Rice University which took more time, effort, and grit than all the other classes that I was taking at that time combined.
Due to my early interest in computers, I declared CS as my major 10 days into college and never looked back. While I came in with a strong interest and a minor head-start in programming i.e. knowing what basic data structures, functions, and loops were, I quickly learned that computer science isn’t programming and that I would have my fair share of struggles as I went through this challenging discipline.
