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Comment by 32bitkid | Hacker News Reader

for people who haven’t gone to a top-tier college/university for computer science—especially self-taught developers—I would say that the corollary advice is also true:

Don’t just build stuff—study stuff!

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Is the undergrad CS curriculum at a top-tier university really that different from that at a regular university?

The average skill level of your peers has a severe impact on the curriculum. I went to a second tier state school, and the majority of my classmates could not write code and struggled through basic data structures and algorithms theory.

I ended up learning some data structures and algorithms through ACM and codewars.com, where my peers from better schools learned them in class.

I've had multiple classes where professors said they had to remove programming assignments and projects from the course because it was reducing the pass rate below acceptable levels.

I would say no, but having taken classes at both, _how_ these courses are taught makes a huge difference. Professors, via their communication abilities, the level of effort put into making a class more interesting, and accessible marks a dramatic difference in what students can get out of a class.

With the modern net, everyone could benefit from the best professors in their respective fields at least for lecture. Doesn't provide the possibility of feedback if you want it to scale ad infinitum, but that sound like it would be worth it.

As stated in the syllabus no, as seen in the classroom yes. In general the students at a top-teir university are faster on the pickup so classes can go deeper into the material. Sure 10% more in one class isn't a big deal but repeated across every class and later classes building on that deeper coverage adds up over the course of a degree program.

From talking to my friends it seems like it's not. All of the lecturers just base their teaching on the same material.

Having gone to a decent state university (Rutgers) and talking to some people who went to CMU for undergrad CS, yes.

this has totally been a struggle for me. self-taught but I have to make time for myself to learn new concepts

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