Comment by 205guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 205guy | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who has studied in the US and France, informatics and computer science are the same thing. Informatics is generally a European term and computer science is used predominently in the US--not sure about UK. There could be slight nuance of definition (infomratics not being hardware based, and CS starting with transistors), but my experience, both covered hardware and software.

So I think you're the perfect candidate for an MS in CS.

What worries me more are the options mentioned in the article and the comments for non-CS/informatics degrees to do an MS in CS. Maybe there is some thinking that someone with a BS degree in any science shouldn't have to do undergrad CS work, but it seems to me they should earn a BS in CS not an MS. I also get that some cross-pollination between similar fields (say robotics and CS, applied math and CS, etc.) can be beneficial to the students and the program in general, but make those students take extra undergad courses to catch up. Dumbing down MS coursework for non-CS people really defeats the purpose of the MS for everyone. That would be my main issue with the topics in the article (having a research-oriented and a non-research MS seems fine to me).

I studied at University of Washington in Seattle.

That said, it was different than Computer Science. Besides one introductory programming course, there was no programming required. Even for our capstone projects, wireframes were sufficient. We didn't actually need to code anything.

To give you an idea, here's the curriculum: http://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics/curriculum

My main concern with doing an MS in CS is that I wasn't exposed to a lot of traditional computer science concepts, such as operating systems, hardware, compilers, algorithms, etc. And the highest level of math I've taken is Calculus I (and a 300-level statistics course which was frankly a joke).

Thanks for the link to the curriculum, I haven't looked into CS education in a long time. My observation is that CS is getting to be a huge field. There was a time when it wasn't much more than OS and compilers (I exaggerate). Now they try to cover the more recent (web apps) and more practical (database retrieval) topics that are directly applicable to new hires. I think that's fine, and your curriculum certainly looks robust (and has some very relevant new topics such as "information ethics and policies"). However, I would still expect you to be able to program after your 2 programming and web technologies classes. And those intro to programming classes are pretty light if they did not cover algorithms.

To take a recent example here on HN: did you cover big-O notation? To me that is fundamental, and the BS programs are cutting corners if they're leaving that out.

The programming courses I took were Intro to Programming I & II. I don't remember many details (has been almost 10 years), but the first one covered basic object oriented programming concepts in Java, and the second one talked about more advanced topics like data abstraction and encapsulation - stacks, queues, linked lists, binary trees, recursion, etc.

I'm generally worried about two points I'm deficient in: subjects that require formal education (I don't know if I can learn about compilers on my own, for example), and subjects that require advanced math.

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