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Comment by meacham | Hacker News Reader

These articles reinforce the imperative of thinking beyond majors. Rarely is any major all-consuming, and students who prepare well can complement a major in one general field (e.g., the social sciences) with a suite of technical coursework. The ethos with which one can approach a history degree isn't altogether different from how to confront training in computer science: rigorous introduction to fundamentals – whether through theory or method, is often more enduring than a skills-based view that is too anchored to the whims of the day.

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In many universities, major programs for CPSC, physics, etc. require courses with prerequisite chains that take several years to go through. It would be quite hard to build up to these while only taking a minor in these subjects. There are courses for non-majors, but these are typically dumbed down to be made more accessible and possible to jump into without much in the way of prerequisites. For example, there is typically a vast difference between a quantum computing course for physics majors (with a few quantum physics courses as prereqs) and a quantum computing course for non-physics majors.

Meanwhile, talking to the prof and being willing to work a little bit can get you into graduate level history courses even if History is not your major and you've taken next to no History courses. An interest in the subject, time to read, and writing skills honed by other subjects are all you really need. For this reason, I'd argue that History is a great minor to take with a science major, but perhaps not the other way around if you plan to work in a technical field. It's definitely possible for a science major to dive into a senior level undergraduate or graduate history course intended for history majors. Arguably, this is more rewarding that taking a course intended to be an easy option for non-majors.

> In many universities, major programs for CPSC, physics, etc. require courses with prerequisite chains that take several years to go through.

At my university, UCSC, math and CS courses tended to be "structured" in the opposite way -- once you'd completed a modest suite of lower-division courses, you tended to be qualified for almost every upper-division course. I assume this was meant to make it easier for people to graduate on time.

The considerable downside was that nearly every class devoted a substantial percentage of the total time to review at the beginning.

It's really useful to distinguish technical fields from engineering and especially natural sciences fields once you get past K12. STEM is not actually a very coherent grouping.

Almost all CS programs are relatively flat, but many science programs have longer chains of linear or parallel pre-reqs.

Math programs differ from both because long chains of pre-reqs in Math often correspond to required maturation rather than required knowledge (e.g. the Calc sequence as a pre-req for algebra courses).

Math and CS professors and students complained loudly about the lack of prerequisites. It did great harm to the curriculum. Defending it on the grounds that math and CS don't need long prerequisite chains in the way that other fields do misses the point.

WRT CS, my comment was meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. FWIW I agree with you, but what I said is largely true of CS curriculum in the US.

I'm not sure whether I agree with you regarding math. I think pre-requisites should reflect required knowledge accurately, and should leave required maturation to the student and his/her instructor. Requiring the calculus sequence prior to courses that contain no calculus strikes me as a silly historical accident, for example.

> Requiring the calculus sequence prior to courses that contain no calculus strikes me as a silly historical accident, for example.

Sure, but I haven't said anything about that.

There is still a chain for history, or used to be thirty years ago, including a foreign language, philosophy, economics, literature, political science, and usually visual arts. That undergraduate history is more accessible than, say, quantum computing, or that professors might let you into a graduate level history class with no prior courses, does not (or at least should not) mean that you are gaining everything that can be had from such a course compared to someone with the full background.

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