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Comment by bsirkia | Hacker News Reader

A more accurate title would be "Studied Humanities, Will Code". I have a liberal arts degree from Middlebury College where I studied Computer Science, so it shouldn't be too surprising that I will code (and do code full-time professionally).

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Similarly, all the CS grads from Berkeley have BA's with lots of general education breadth requirements (EECS students have BS's).

If I could afford to continue and get a 4 year CS degree, I'd prefer myself to get a BA, or get a CS degree at a non engineering school.

Right I think that in a lot of ways it's actually an advantage to do CS at a Liberal Arts school. The key point to this article seems to be that you can always learn to code regardless of what you've learned in the past.

At most LACs, you can't get a BS degree. With that being side, my experience with liberal arts CS education (at Wesleyan) is ironically that it was too much CS because "liberal arts is suppose to be self-enrichment and theory". We went into a lot of theory and math (e.g., functional language, language design, automata, algorithm proof of correctness) and even the "practicum" courses was fairly academic (information theory analysis on genomic data, cryptography) and not "web development" or "J2EE".

That goes back to the perpetual debate between applied and theory classes. I'm not sure if it has to do with LACs vs research universities or whatnot.

I received my CS and MS in CompSci from a liberal arts school. For me it was a great route to take.

OT, but 7 weeks at the Middlebury Summer Languages program let me go from zero French to placing into third year French when I returned to my... um, "full-time" college the following fall. (After fighting them because they initially insisted I couldn't have progressed beyond a second year placement.)

Abilities and performance varied significantly, but the program let you make rapid progress if you were of a mind to.

If I may ask (in part because I consider returning to that area of Vermont), how did you find the Computer Sciences program?

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