Show HN: UChicago admissions asked me to find Waldo. I did.

I'd say this is counsellor friendly. One of the most impressive things was that he was willing to acknowledge sources - basically he gave credit where it was due. This doesn't take away from his essay, instead it shows that he can use existing ideas in an original way.

I hope he gets accepted! I tip my hat to the author.

I "prospied" last weekend and the professor I met at Hack Night said that the systems side of the department has a stronger focus in that area, though he may be in the minority there. The theory side is interesting as well, though I don't want to get too far away from reality.

Thanks so much! This is why I love HN. I will definitely be in touch.

UofC fourth-year CS major here. While the department is still heavily focused on theory, over the last three years it has greatly improved its offerings as far as practical hacking goes. In the last two years alone several new systems faculty have been hired and the student hacker rso has grown dramatically. http://hack.uchicago.edu

> If you're a hacker who loves to see code run and solve real world problems you may be frustrated at the UoC

I graduated from the U of C in '97. Did the startup thing for a while, then went on to Yahoo & Google. In my early career, I used to lament the fact that the U of C hadn't taught me various "practical" things. I was shocked the first time I heard a coworker mentioned they had a class on just a programming language.

Eventually, I grew to appreciate that those "practical" things both change & are relatively easy to learn on your own. Whereas an academic environment is a much easier place to learn things like theory.

Not to say they need to be mutually exclusive, just to say there is value in the emphasis on theory.

All that said, and as much as I love the U of C, I'd tell a high school kid interest in Comp Sci to go to Stanford, U of I, or CMU.

Indeed, the department has changed a bit recently, and the student hacker community is thriving. Theory is still strong, but I would like to add to bwaldrep's point by noting that a few classes are (now) dominated by actually building stuff: in Networks, students build an IRC server, a stripped-down TCP stack, and a rudimentary IP router from scratch; in Operating Systems, students fill in some of the interesting parts of threading, virtual memory, user programs (i.e. implementing system calls), and file system access in the Pintos educational kernel; in Databases, students build a stripped down SQLite-alike database library.

That doesn't necessarily discount your point about frustration, but my impression is that the situation has 'improved' (I'm not one to make normative claims though). In any case, as a math-disinclined hacker, I've been very happy with the courses I've taken.

Aside: I encourage you to drop by a hack night and see what's going on if you find yourself in Chicago on a Friday evening. We love having alums visit and talk about what they are doing!

I got my degree in a non-CS engineering field. As a working programmer I never regretted not having classes where I built stuff. Always did regret hitting a problem where I knew there was an applicable theoretical framework that I hadn't been exposed to in school.

I'm in the UK and did a degree in software engineering which was pretty light on comp sci theory, but still had the similar pain of sitting through basic programming structure lectures for almost 2 years before hitting any kind of complicated software problems.

It is difficult to say this without sounding arrogant but my god did I suffer during my college years because of this.

Every class, every project, every assignment I felt damn I already know all this.

It also makes team work a torture. I didn't want to ruin other people's experience by being the know it all guy. So I just avoided teamwork as much as I could because pretending that I'm challenged by the question/project got even more depressing.

Having to pay thousands of dollars for it makes it even harder (I simply had to do it as I'm not a citizen). I'd think man there's so much more that I could do with this money I'm paying for something I already know.

That's not to say I think I know a lot, in fact I think I know very little but just that the college wasn't providing anything new for me (and yes it was one of the top ones).

I'm learning more by reading books and posts on the internet, hacker news, etc... and by doing actual work in the industry.

> Sitting in classes listening to an instructor spend a whole week explaining how a "for" loop works to students who for the most part won't be able to successfully write their own "for" loop by the time they graduate (with a 3.5 GPA in CS).

That may be true at some places, but certainly not in the intro curriculum at the UofC. The intro course for majors with no background uses the Scheme-based How to Design Programs curriculum, which doesn't even _have_ a for loop :-)

The honors intro, which I assume this student would enroll in, is a quite challenging curriculum, expecting students to learn scheme, haskell, perl, bash, and some basic parsing tools over the course of a quarter. And do reasonable things with them.

So, while I'm certainly biased as a grad student here at the UofC, I could promise the student they won't be getting slowly spoon-fed language features. Even if they took the intro CS curriculum for non-majors in the sciences.

Uni is not just about the lessons. And you can always skip those lessons, or do other work in it.

Although there should be a way to skip the intro courses. But stuff does get interesting later, I got to write a compiler, write the same program in 4 different languages, learn how a CPU works and is designed, program in COBOL, functional languages and write software to interact with hardware. I would never have done that without Uni.

I'm sitting in a intro web development class at my university. We're learning C# and basic HTML/CSS. I didn't know when our exam was, and I showed up one day and got a 100%. Intro programming classes are a waste of time for someone who knows how to code.

Just as a mechanical engineering degree requires a lot of physics classes, a software engineering degree would require a lot of computer science classes. There would still need to be intro courses; he has demonstrated he could probably skip them.

I'm not sure what your "turning algorithms into code" comment means. If you're trying to say that he should skip the beginner courses, then sure. But I don't see how that relates to software engineering versus computer science.

Even if there were separate software engineering and computer science tracks, you can't say which one the author should be in. That depends on what he wants to do after college: be a professional software developer, or do computer science research?

True, it wasn't a great piece of writing. I was going for clarity and the ability to communicate technical ideas to nontechnical people rather than style. The other two essays in the application are much more personable and higher-quality prose.

I disagree. I'd estimate his writing skills are in the 95%+ percentile for 17/18 year olds.

In the last 5-7 years, the English curriculum in US schools has changed significantly in an effort to improve NCLB reading scores. One part of the curriculum that had to get trimmed down was writing composition.

These days, unless you were home schooled or attended grades 9-12 at a quality private school, you probably won't be taught how to write a proper essay until college.

It was explicitly allowed by a question last year, though this year's supplement is silent on that issue. So maybe not, and I wouldn't pull that at an institution with a different culture, but all 6 questions are curveballs and clearly designed to encourage creativity. I don't think they'll mind.

I'd recommend taking this advice with a grain of salt. OP is clearly talented, and a U of C degree will pay huge dividends down the line. There are lots of great jobs closed to people without a top-notch degree on their resume. Though balancing debt for college is always something that should be kept in mind.

i'm sure many enterprising young applicants used the same essay for both the common and (un)common apps.

There was a trend of renewed lamentations over the "de-weirding" of UChicago following the Common App switch, but they seem to have fallen off after 4 years...

I applied early action before publishing, and the deadline will pass in a few minutes.

Fixed, thanks.

Yep, thanks. Nothing I can do about it now :(. Actually caught that one while editing, but "fixed" it incorrectly. The public version is correct now, though.