What does a CS education at university teach you that you wouldn't learn if you self studied?

What does a CS education at university teach you that you wouldn't learn if you self studied?

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citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.455.2393&rep=rep1&type=pdf
scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_Normale_Supérieure_people
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_Polytechnique_alumni
youtube.com/watch?v=6bQWxtoCav4
Sup
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Resources, alumni networks, research opportunities, degrees.

You can self-teach, but you need projects to prove you know what you're doing.

If you live in the US, nothing. If you live in Europe, everything, but you're a fucking millennial who learns programming on YouTube videos and then thinks he's an expert, so you won't listen anyway.

Discipline.

>every country in Europe is the same

Irishfag here.
Left a part time course in a university here.
It was literally a mixture of pajeets (I wish I were joking here), girls who would say "wow" to anything fucking remotely related to computers, a few 50 year olds who thought that they used DOS a few decades ago they could learn to program.

But ultimately, nothing for the most part.
If you wanted to do stuff that needed 5k+ workstations, then sure, you can use their equipment and save yourself money.
But it doesn't "teach" you anything you can't learn yourself, at a much, much faster pace.
That's what makes university a terrible idea, it's based around teaching the retards first so the average vir/g/in is going to bored.

It does, however, get you a degree and HR departments are retarded so they depend on CS degrees for a fucking sysadmin position.
It also generally has you getting connections (Sometimes) and an internship.

But you'd be better off just fucking making a github, throwing some neat things on there and follow industry standards for coding. Should take less than six months.
Meanwhile, in six months in your CS degree, you'll be waiting for Mr. Professor to help Samir (who can't speak fucking English) or else Old John (who thinks CS is going to be easy because of his experience using DOS in 1991) to teach them how a fucking copy and paste works

given equal ability, work ethic etc. you'll learn way faster at a university than from self-study

you went to a shitty university.

user, Trinity is in the top 100 colleges in the world.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that universities are fucking money scams and like everything else, you're paying for the name.

Most unis are like that though, maybe not to that extend. The first few years are literally "this is the Windows operating system and this is how you make a folder". They expect everyone starting to be retarded and not seen a computer before.

Ideally how to work on a team.

I wished they taught integration, how to keep a codebase maintainable, and good planning.

You don't go to a university to learn you fucking retard. You go to a university to get the qualifications for a job.

If it's a good program, hopefully you learn how to actually specify a problem and design the most efficient solution, instead of just random programming without thinking about what you're doing.

Nothing, but it shows potential future employees that you can buckle down and get shit done when instructed to and if you take uni classes it will probably move faster than you learning on your own from books

>user, Trinity is in the top 100 colleges in the world.
You took shitty classes then.

>Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that universities are fucking money scams and like everything else, you're paying for the name.
What you get out of going to a university mostly depends on you. If you go to a good university you'll find plenty of creative, ambitious, intelligent people to study with. You have a choice of interesting classes, professors to talk to and tons of ways to stand out if you're good. If all you do is read the curriculum and pass the exams then obviously you won't learn much, but if your aim is to learn as much as possible about a subject and you take the necessary steps to make that happen then a university is a great place to be. Plus if you're actually good you'll have high paying job offers thrown at you.

user, can I advise you to look up how college works in Ireland before you post again, thanks. Because as it stands, you sound like a retard with that statement, no offense.

Also again, college is there for three reasons: you pay to be given a piece of paper to say you went there, to make connections/internship and to rent out their equipment

this. master's degree in CS made me get used to working 60 hour weeks :)

I'd argue you wouldn't go through the material with the same depth.
> linear algebra
> propositional- , first order-, higher order logic
> runtime&space complexity
> numerics
> relational algebra
> functional, logic, oop programming
> networking, signal encodings
> graph theory
to just name a few.

The shit they teach in school works for 99% of the population. For the other 1% you have to work really hard to forget that.
I went to Uni with the assumption all I would learn are a few languages and best practices. And boy was I wrong.
They tell you straight up to forget everything you know about math, reasoning and programming and do it from scratch the proper way.

It gives you a formal qualification

Nothing except for unnecessary shit.
Just read some good books and do the included coursework and you will have better knowledge than 90% of CS Students.
This is not a Joke.

- How to force yourself to do things you do not want to do on a daily basis. This will benefit you when you're employed.

- How to work with people you don't want to be working with, and still achieve decent results. This will benefit you when you're employed.

- How to produce software and solutions by someone else's standards. This will benefit you when you're employed.

- How to properly plan and execute tasks on a tight schedule. This will benefit you when you're employed.

- How things you didn't expect to be relevant actually are relevant. How valuble knowledge of a certain topic can be, even though you expected it to be worthless.

- How you compare to other people in the field, especially people who study CS.

- What you're missing out on by not studying.

dont forget about AI (probability, statistics) and computation theory (Turing Machines, not just runtime and space complexity)

also my school makes you read a SHIT TON from all the books. Straight up 3 courses, each requiring 80+ pages read a week + 2-3 hours of exercises as homework. You get knowledge real fast.

well maybe on practical tasks. But as soon as you run into shit like data structures and the read/write complexity behind it a CS Student will know what to use.
It is Computer Science, the science is in there for a reason

great points...also being focused on certain tasks/subjects for extended period of time, when, if by yourself, would've "call it a day and relax" at 4 pm

the degree or what you "learn" is worthless. the contacts you make, and the internships you can get because of your university, those are the important things.

you won't get a job without friends. you won't get a job is you are best of your class only.

First three things are learned at age 5 in school
Four is learned at age 6 when you start getting homework
Five is.. also learned in primary school
Six is fucking irrelvant - any college degree does not teach you good things. It teaches you what the college wants to teach you.
You learn industry standards and standards in general from working, not from paying college 3k a year to teach you outdated methods because fuck updating their methods, too much work.

A good book will teach you all of that in a much deeper way.
Who said you should only buy the "How to program for dummies" books?
Get one with a solid foundation into theoretical informatics and you are good to go.

Some domains like mathematical optimization and tcs (both the automata shit but also the arithmetic hierarchy, zk proofs, etc.) Ultimately you are responsible for choosing a curriculum of things you wouldn't learn on your own.

>First three things are learned at age 5 in school
first, "age 5" is a great exaggeration.

1. How to force yourself to do things you do not want to do on a daily basis.
The majority of students still struggle with this in uni. That's why many procrastrinate (also in workplaces) and cram during the last days.

2. How to work with people you don't want to be working with, and still achieve decent results.
Plenty of students still struggle with this in uni. They even struggle with it later, too. But obviously you'll get better at it if you repeatedly practice it.

3. How to produce software and solutions by someone else's standards.
Did you even read the post?

---
>Four is learned at age 6 when you start getting homework
Right. Because every fucking kid from age 6 sits down on their own to do their homework daily, without having to be told by their parents.
Not even most teens do this.

>Five is.. also learned in primary school
No, this is topic-specific. You can learn about the concept at a young age, but you can only learn that through studying a topic that is unexpectedly useful.

>How you compare to other people in the field
>fucking irrelvant
You need to know this to stay competetive.

Worked 15 hours a day including weekends for mine. RD stole my research anyway. Got buttmad when I called him out on it by inadvertence because I didn't realize what he was doing, did it more subtly after. He then tried everything to tank me. The thesis evaluators still found mine to be outstanding at least.
Academemeia not even once.

Damn so its not just me. MSc is no fucking joke man

>Academemeia not even once.

more like
>making blanket statements about an entire domain of higher education, based off your own personal expericence with one co-student at one certain university
>not even once

No.
You learned group play in fucking kindergarten, user.
People who are spoiled brats have trouble - regular people do not.
You learn to create things to other people's standards - software, artwork, fucking reading to a standard of someone else, etc. It doesn't matter. You learn to work to a standard set by someone else.

Also again, all you do in college is pay for a paper that gets you past HR.

What if you graduate with no connections or internships?

>They tell you straight up to forget everything you know about math
Holy fuck do I rage when they fucking say this. Like how the fuck is high school maths wrong? That's the kind of shit dumb teachers say that gives me allergies. Maybe YOU used to not understand maths correctly in high school. But that's YOUR problem, not HS maths' problem.

Then you still have a piece of paper that proves you studied

how to work with retards
how to work for retards
how to interact with retards on a daily basis

Coding standards
Recursion
Up-to-date APIs
Problem-solving methodologies
This is not a bad response.

I tried to teach myself from online resources (i.e not academic resources) and found that I would end up learning outdated APIs. That, for instance, is how I learned WebForms for ASP.NET despite the fact that nobody uses those anymore.

There was another situation:
A friend of my name, who we'll call Jay, decided one day that he was too good for attending classes and said that he would teach himself OOP in Java himself. About ten weeks later, I had become proficient with OOP in Java and had learned the JavaFx framework and he was clueless on most of the relevant OOP vocabulary. He boasted to me that he had written his own version of Galaga but as it turned out he wrote it in AWT (which was relevant in the late nineties) and he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.

An RD is in no way a co-student.
It's true I'm generalizing, this left me a horrible aftertaste. It's also true that my colleagues confided in me independently that they experienced the same thing in completely different unis (not even the same country). It definitely could be limited to cs, or to a few fields.

The problem isn't the math but how it is taught. Got 46% in a midterm after religiously taking notes and listening intently in class. Got 99% in the final by never showing up to class even once, and casually watching khan academy vids instead.

Take heed to the reasons listed here.
Also, school gives you a better coverage of fundamentals. When a job interviewer asks you about the principles of object oriented design, or performance implications of different data structures, design patterns, idiosyncrasies of C++, etc., you want to know the answer.
Another advantage of school is that it gives you a broad exposure to different topics, disciplines and industries. "Useless things" are taught to students, because people have no idea what they want to do. You might take a course in combinatorics just because you're forced to, but then fall in love with it, and maybe even decide to persue a career in it.
I had only a vague idea of what I was going to do when I started school. I changed major to CS a year later, then I had definite plans after taking computational graphics. You may meet many different professors, peers, and discover or work in research projects that inspire you to persue passions, even one you didn't know you had.

I'm sorry, user, but "How to work with people you don't want to be working with, and still achieve decent results" in CS academia and CS workplaces doesn't equal "group play in kindergarten".

>People who are spoiled brats have trouble - regular people do not.
I haven't argued against this. It also doesn't negate anything I've said.

>You learn to work to a standard set by someone else.
Yes. In rudimentary disciplines taught in whatever primary/secondary education you get. You're taught to live up to much higher standards in tertiary ed, especially in CS. That is what will prepare you for employment.

>all you do in college is pay for a paper that gets you past HR.
We don't pay for tertiary ed on a personal basis where I live, as education is considered a fundamental societal right where I live (and financed by taxes). The fact that the college papers does get you past HR is not something I'm arguing, and I'm also of the opinion that that's the way it should be. The fact that the papers do work like that doesn't prove anything else you said, either.

You can easily learn all of that comfy at home. You must choose the right books and not just watching khan academy videos. If you want to have good basics just learn maths with books and do every exercises, analysis, algebra, logic and proofs is the only thing you need in maths, lurk on /sci/ for good recommendations. For the cs part you can read SICP, it's a good start. Don't forget to study more math than cs if you want to be good.
Personally i'm studying maths at my university and i learn cs stuff at home, it's literally perfect for cs compared to some meme cs universities that are teaching too much programming (for code monkeys).

t. went to bad uni

It's because you didn't do exercises. In class you learn the cool stuff: defining structures and proving theorems about them, generalising a cool result to a shitload of cases, ... But that's not what you do in exams. That would be too hard and would require more thought than even a 4h exam. So instead in exams you do the shitty work of calculating things, studying variations of and plotting functions, calculating areas, ... Those things that if you know how to do them it doesn't mean at all that you understand the material.
The way to learn maths is: you study the course religiously AND do a shit tonne of exercises.

It equals it, yes.
Don't act like forcing people to get along with gritted teeth is a skill only in CS.

You're actually not taught that in college for CS, though. You're taught how to pass a course, not how to move to industry standards, that is what your internship is for.

One of the best unis in the world is bad
thanks, user, for that terribly sounding logic you have

Wrong. I did all the exercises and even looked for extra ones in part 1. In part 2, I never did more than 2 exercises per topic.

hi pal,

i could go to the university of manchester or i could go to the university of oxford for comp sci

which one would i choose?

There are a lot of pajeets in my uni but it seems that about 90% of them have failed or will fail according to profs. All the profs are shit-talking them, too. It's kinda hilarious, actually. Most of them don't even attend lectures and rules are very strict in post soviet uni's.

Neither because college is pretty worthless but if you must, Oxford if you're going to fuck of out of England for the name brand.
Otherwise go with whatever is easier to travel to.

>Ended up learning outdated APIs
>Using ASP.NET
Google the API and find the latest version. Every major API also has shitloads of documentation and guides. Also, nobody (sane) uses ASP.NET for WebDev anymore. Go learn whatever new JS framework is out.

>It equals it
Then I don't know what to say. If you're actually referring to the group-form of parallel play in developmental psychology, then I don't think I can take you through it step by step and explain how that's different from "How to work with people you don't want to be working with, and still achieve decent results". It's simply deranged.

>Don't act like forcing people to get along with gritted teeth is a skill only in CS.
I'm not acting like that. But if you were to read the OP, then you would learn that the topic of this thread is:
>What does a CS education at university teach you that you wouldn't learn if you self studied?
>CS education

>You're actually not taught that in college for CS
>You're taught how to pass a course
Yes. And the course standards are very likely to be completely different than your own personal standards when doing projects, and that's part of the point. You're taught how to pass a course, you're taught how to complete projects according to all kinds of standards. That will prepare you for employment.

>That is what your internship is for.
Most likely more company-specific standards. That part will also be much easier if you're already accustomed to industry standards, which you should have been taught at uni.

If you aren't able to say anything then just don't say anything. IT's okay, user

it's not wrong. They just don't teach you why things are as they are and hammer down concepts that, like I said, work for the vast majority of people but are really hard to undo once you get into the why.

HS linear algebra for example was all about R^2 & R^3 for me.
Good luck wrapping your head around function vector spaces with that picture in mind.

Okay. This might help you in social situations in the future:
When people say "I don't know what to say", it can mean that they simply don't know how to answer something at that specific point in thime because something in the conversation puts them off. It can be something like randomness, or pure idiocy. They need to mentally recalibrate themselves and adjust what they're saying since their usual plan of action might not actually work.

It can also be used to express the sentiment above, even though the person actually isn't dumbfounded by the sheer retardation of the questions posed. It can be used as a comment on what the perceived level the other person's arguments are on.

I can unironically recommend this book to you:
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.455.2393&rep=rep1&type=pdf

In any case, it was just the the first paragraph that was related to what was said in the first sentence - not the entire comment.

I studied CS in Eastern Europe in the early 00's:
>mathematical analysis
>algebra
>numerical methods
>discrete mathematics
>physics
>electronics
>signal processing
>graph theory
>pages after pages after pages of fucking formal proofs everywhere

The only thing it gave me is the right to use the "hurr, universities are becoming vocational schools for code monkeys these days" and "durr, astronomy vs. telescopes" memes. The fact of the matter is, I have since forgotten at least 90% of that shit and found it to be a problem exactly zero times.

I think we often overestimate the amount of stuff we forget.
If I'd throw A* at you, you'd still grasp the concept much faster than a freshman since you did graph theory before.

>tfw my CS degree is just a renamed IT degree
I'm really just paying for the piece of paper at this stage. All of the programming subjects are just for learning the language rather than using it for anything useful. It's mostly high level stuff save for a couple of subjects. We even had a required web subject that still taught XSLT (does anyone still use this?). Anyway, I forgot it all already.

I can transfer but I don't know if I should or whether I should just cruise through this degree and learn the missing stuff on my own. In my country the lines between CS and IT are a bit blurred except for a select 1 or 2 universities, but even then there's nothing close to the rigor of programs in the US.

For me it was just this. University showed me MY personal limits. How late can I push work and still produce good results? How much work can I do in a day? How do I work under pressure?
Stuff like that and social connections are the most valuable things I got from university

Nothing. The university system is outdated and overrun with women. That said, a degree is still valuable for you to properly integrate in society and raise your status (assuming that's a goal you have).

>Also, nobody (sane) uses ASP.NET for WebDev anymore. Go learn whatever new JS framework is out.
Obviously. But you wouldn't know this if you were self-teaching on YouTube and various code blogs.

lol why are europeans so arrogant your universities are even more outdated than america

Gives you good fundamentals for interviews. There is a clear difference between self-taught and university educated job candidates when you interview them. I remember interviewing a self-taught guy and asking him what a Merkle Tree was and he stared at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead but he's been working on good, well developed projects for 10+ years and has quite a good reputation. It's not that I don't think he was a good programmer, he was actually better then the university educated ones I interviewed but I see him having issues in meetings and collaboration so we could not hire him.

You will ignore any hard subject or get deep in any subject, just take easy problems,memorize definicions and avoid any theorical subject, because it isn't real world, you will learn new framework,new language, new shiny thing but avoid the way you build software.

This guy get good roadmap as MIT curriculum

scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/

But every exam or homework had massive fails on complex or deep questions.

Still a lot developers say don't need math or learn algorithms and data structures.

You are the reason pajeetware is the norm nowadays. Do the world some good and shoot yourself in the head right now.

>(does anyone still use this?)
Daily, in fact literally right now as I browse this thread, for managing an XML-based documentation database. I didn't learn it at uni though, I picked it up on the job.

>What does a CS education at university teach you that you wouldn't learn if you self studied?

Nothing. In fact, you learn vastly LESS in terms of both depth and breath taking CS courses rather than studying textbooks on your own.

>le pajeeting is computer science maymay XD

>Resources
CS isn't Engineering. CS labs are just standard computers.

>being the delusional cs major meme

Self teaching requires far more discipline than taking courses. There's nobody to yell at you for not continuing on with new material when you're by yourself.

>But it doesn't "teach" you anything you can't learn yourself, at a much, much faster pace.
>That's what makes university a terrible idea, it's based around teaching the retards first so the average vir/g/in is going to bored.

That's not a problem with universities so much as with garbage degree like Computer Science and other liberal arts and business majors.

Not a single statement in that pic is correct.
>/sci/ logic

Nothing. But 99.999% of people aren't going to study the "boring" parts on their own and repeat shit until it's ingrained into their brain like you would at school.

credibility
effectiveness of '''self-teaching''' is subjective

You don't need a university to teach you this.

That's just you and your shitt university mate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_Normale_Supérieure_people
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_Polytechnique_alumni
*invents half of science*

I don't think I've ever watched a YouTube video on programming except when I tried to put together a project in UE4's graphical language. In general, I've had much more success with official documentation, StackOverflow, Google, and man pages.

0/10

nothing, however they will give you exams to prove to employers that you fit a mold. also you can meet other like minded people there, some who are rich and well connected. Modern Education is just a filtering mechanism to put people into the right place in the machine.

t.salty maths degree student

This.

>I'm aware that universities are fucking money scams

Only if you don't care about learning and take uninteresting and non-challenging courses.

No, that's a community college nondegree/noncredit class for the elderly and third world'ers.

>Ideally how to work on a team.

AKA one guy does all the work while everyone else goes radio silent. Literally this everytime:
youtube.com/watch?v=6bQWxtoCav4

So if I wanted to learn about electronics, circuits, hardware, and programming systems, what should I study?

Not a damn thing. Do hands on practice work in VM or some old pos shit box you care nothing for while you study. College forces you to take classes (and pay for them) that have nothing to do with your major plus you'll never use them in the real world. Back in the day you could actually take only Cisco CCNA training classes at college, now they rope those in with loads of other shit that have nothing to do with getting that CCNA cert. Certs are the way to go, along with doing shit in a VM/some pos shit box. You want to be good at AD? Fire up a few copy of Server 2008R2/2012/2016 in VM and create a domain along with a backup domain controller plus sub domain or two. Then have it all work flawlessly along with DHCP/DNS. Then create a few fake users and get them access to both domains along with access permissions for shares. Then practice changing the forest/domain levels along with what to do if a domain controller fails. Setup a DC Cluster. etc

Electrical engineering. Pretty self-explanatory and clear-cut desu senpai.

Group work. Youre not going to be a developer working alone, you will be working in a team. If you have the money to afford university with a decent CS program it makes getting a job much easier.

Quantum physics.

Serious question

People try to learn programming from YouTube videos?

This meme killed university.

You can't learn how to program in university. School can teach you the basic syntax and constructs but that's it. You have to go out and use it for projects you care about and learn from your mistakes. And take the initiative to improve your skills and learn more.

This.

This is all trivial math.
> networking, signal encodings
What depth is there in endianness, bit structure of packets, or error checking/crc? I doubt you were referring fft or ecc as cs kiddies don't do signal processing nor coding theory and you would have called it that if you were.
>They tell you straight up to forget everything you know about math, reasoning and programming and do it from scratch the proper way.
No, they didn't want you forget everything. You're probably referring to intro to proofs where they didn't want you to use later results for proving theorems as those theorems will probably be used to prove the later results and lead to circular reasoning. You must suck at math (but that's not surprising for cs majors).

They just want a degree, any degree. It could be in literally anything.

This.

Data structures aren't complicated and most cs majors barely study them.

In real life you won't have a professor or parent to keep you focused on doing tasks. You need to learn self accountability sooner or later.

>arithmetic hierarchy

Most cs majors don't learn that. Their toc knowledge peaks with Sipser which you could easily read on your own.

>Coding standards
>Up-to-date APIs
You don't learn this in university.
>Recursion
Not sure if trolling or really retarded.

>If you want to have good basics just learn maths with books and do every exercises, analysis, algebra, logic and proofs is the only thing you need in maths, lurk on /sci/ for good recommendations

Or just go on their wikia:
Sup Forums-science.wikia.com/wiki/Computer_Science_and_Engineering
Sup Forums-science.wikia.com/wiki/Mathematics

You don't need university for anything, you can learn all this shit through just reading books, but having a degree tells employers you passed tests so you do know something verse just saying you know something. If you can prove to an employer you know your shit or get them to look at your resume without having a degree then you don't need one, but that's probably going to be hard.

Not much desu

There's an entire recorded course from MIT on C on there. It's older, but it's not like C has changed much anyways.

EE / ECE / CpE / CSE / EECS

Nothing
scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/

>taking hs math in college

Keep projecting I guess? Are you a bot or just retarded?

Group projects, deadlines.