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I'm far from some authority on this, but I'm currently in a CS degree program so my opinion may be relevant to you. My advice, as limited as it is, would be to recommend a CS degree as well. It's very math-heavy, but fortunately so are engineering degrees. If he starts taking programming classes and loves it, then excellent, stay the course. If he ends up hating programming (which he will likely end up taking as a freshman) then he can easily swap majors to some engineering discipline and wouldn't lose much (if any) progress. If he doesn't want to transition into an engineering field, there are a lot of IT degrees with less focus on programming and math, depending on the school. Either way, the classes wouldn't go to waste.
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Jun 13, 2017 15:07
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In regards to not being strong in math, here's a quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist) that really stuck with me: “I think what’s going on here is people presume that if the math is not coming easy that therefore you’ll never learn it. And I meant it literally that math is the language of the universe, and it’s like any other language, especially a language that does not share the Roman alphabet. So, for example, if you wanted to study Chinese, it looks completely intractable at first… and you can ask the question, ‘how long does it take one to become fluent in Chinese, if you’re not Chinese yourself?’ …it can take… almost 10 years, if you never go to China. If you go to China, maybe 5 years of intensive exposure - and you’ve never done that with math - imagine that level of exposure to math, what kind of fluency you would have at the other end of that pipeline. So at least give yourself the opportunity that any person learning a foreign language would give themselves before you turn around and say you’re not good at math.” Like most things, math is hard until you understand what's going on, then it seems trivial. So, I would tell him not to worry about it, just to put forth the work and the results will come.
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Jun 16, 2017 15:23
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:One of the issues with middle-school / high school / early college level math classes that discourages students is the preoccupation with memorization, and timed quizzes and tests. In the real world, you can take days to work through a math-y programming problem and no one will really care, you can read whatever book you want, and you only have to solve the problem once and the computer will remember it forever. You don't have to knock the math classes out of the park - it's ok to muddle through linear algebra and calculus with B's - you just need to learn enough from the classes to know what books have the answers to the problems you're trying to solve. I wish this was how it went, not "learn a new concept on tuesday, have a hard-as-gently caress quiz on thursday."
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Jul 5, 2017 21:46
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