Comment by astrofinch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrofinch | Hacker News Reader

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In California, you can take the CHSPE

http://chspe.net/

to enroll in community college as young as 16. California has made it really easy to transfer from community colleges to UC schools. Transferring in to UC Berkeley's computer science program is very doable, especially if you apply through its College of Letters and Science (which you want to do anyway, since they are a lot more lenient than the College of Engineering in terms of letting you take time off and choosing the classes that interest you).

Advantages of this route:

* You can skip 2 years of high school and graduate with a BA while your high school friends are finishing their second years of college.

* You save money living with your parents and going to community college for the first 2 years.

* Your chances of getting in to a prestigious UC actually increase quite substantially.

This is roughly what I did and I've been extremely happy about it. Feel free to contact me for details/individual advice: [my username] at gmail dot com

Which leaves you with a BA instead of a BS and on a less technical level than the alternative route would take. This appears no different than CIS through Arts & Sciences versus CSE through Engineering at alma mater.

I can assure you, after graduation virtually no one cares about BA vs BS. All they see is Berkeley.

The level of your technical skills is entirely up to you.

Honestly though, will this really mean anything a year after graduating? Sincere question. I don't have a CS degree (or any bachelors degree) though I am pursuing one. The drumbeat seems to be that the most important lessons one learns with a BS in CS is the algorithms classes. Would a BA not deliver those classes to its students?

As a recruiting manager, I never really made any distinction between BA/BS/B.Sc/whatever. A degree from a good school with good grades is good enough, it isn't critical what the degree is called exactly. CS isn't Physics where you should have lots of years of study to actually be able to do something useful.

To add a frame of reference, Berkeley also gives a BA in Math.

The difference between BA in CS vs. BS in EECS (there is no BS in CS!) is that BA CS is more grounded in mathematics, algorithms, logic etc... BS EECS is more grounded in hardware/engineering. Nonetheless, all have to take courses in algorithms, computer architecture, machine structures, etc... The rest is up to you. You can do a BA with somewhat of a hardware focus, or a BS with a software focus. You can take whatever classes you'd like on top of that.

Otherwise, there's no difference. As for getting a job, getting a good internship matters far more than what your degree and where you went to school. A good school will help you find a good internship. Just for $deity's sake, do something technical over the summer vacations (instead of doing nothing or working at the mall).

For what it's worth, interview questions also tend to be more focused on discrete mathematics and algorithms than they are on systems and hardware, so a BA might actually prepare you better.

Finally, the education is for your own sake, not for the sake of your employer.

At Berkeley, the BA and the BS degrees have the same associated CS classes--the BS just requires you to take physics and electrical engineering.

And why couldn't you just take the CS classes that the BS requires anyway? The BA/BS non-major classes are the ones where the BS/BA are going to matter for CS. Do you have more background knowledge in Arts? or Sciences?

I certainly depends on the school, but at least as important as Algorithms, course-wise, are Architecture, Operating Systems, Networking, and in some fields, Numerical Analysis. I'd say a BA with those first three is just as good most BS'es. If you're looking to work in industry building real systems (not just gluing Java API's together), you need at least a cursory understanding of those topics, which a BA may not provide.

It matters some. I've done some hiring, and in a technical field where the BS is commonly done a BA makes me a little skeptical. Like you couldn't handle or avoided the spectrum of harder science classes. Might not be fair, and it wouldn't rule you out in my book, but it matters some.

You can't judge this simply based on the degree name. A lot depends on the school and how they do things. I'm not entirely sure but I think my CS degree is a BA. But I've taken enough high level math classes to have a BS in math (I had to pick either or, they wouldn't give me both), and I also took all the hard CS courses: Algorithms, OS, Compilers, Computer Graphics. If having a BA gives you pause for a candidate, I would strongly suggest you simply ask them what courses they took.

I had a BA because every first degree at my alma mater BA. I guarantee you it's at least the equal of any science course anywhere in the world.

(They give you an MA for free later, but that's a weird historical accident; I have a proper Masters' and a PhD as well.)

  > I had a BA because every first degree at my alma mater
  > BA. I guarantee you it's at least the equal of any 
  > science course anywhere in the world.

I assume it's a bit different for European universities. In general, the BA/BSc distinction tends to be a meaningful one in the US.

  > (They give you an MA for free later, but that's a weird
  > historical accident; I have a proper Masters' and a PhD
  > as well.)

Weird? Try cool. They're seriously considering abolishing that particular quirk, though.

At Berkeley, the BA and BS for Computer Science are effectively the same. All the core courses are the same, it's just the general requirements are different. The degree designation really doesn't matter. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Harvard also grants Bachelor of Arts degrees (they use AB instead of BA) for Computer Science.

The CS classes I take are the same. The only difference is what I'm taking in addition to my CS classes.

It really differs between universities. In some universities, there isn't a difference between BA and BS, while in others, there are big differences. And in some British universities (like the one I attend), the only choice is BA in computer science.

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