Posted on 12/29/2016 9:02:04 PM PST by Tai_Chung
I hear Drury’s a good school.
Don’t go into “Computer Science”.
Most of that work is done by Indians now, at extremely low rates of pay. Especially, H1B Visa holders will do the work at 1/3rd of what your daughter needs to pay the rent on a cheap apartment.
Go for Math, Statistics and Data Science. Those may last awhile (10 years?) before becoming commoditized offshore.
Avoid the University of Missouri. Freshman enrollment is down 2400 students this year, funding is down mi$$ions due to the radical left.
Come to Alabama. Roll Tide.
Warning: they accept NO federal money.
Campbell University is close to Raleigh and is pretty conservative.
I'm still in the industry and I am currently straddled between the past and the future. Part of my work is designing systems that will accommodate mainframe migration from proprietary systems to linux, thus the past. The other part of my work is scoping out use cases for the FPGA's that Intel is baking into our current generation CPU sockets, which is the near term future.
Today's programming opportunities are certainly not constrained by tools of 10 years ago. However, going Biblical on you, "There is nothing new under the sun". The "tools" and particular applications are fads which come and go. But there are underlying principles which re-occur over and over again.
Thus, my appeal to the book: Designing Data-Intensive Applications. It describes principles which I have seen in myriad systems during the last 40 years. Just going out and learning "Big Data" isn't going to get you the background you need. It will get you a job.
The industry itself has a habit of throwing the baby out with the bath water. When "relational databases" hit the scenes in the 1980's, everyone turned their back on CODASYL, network databases. The appeal was that the programmers didn't need to know the structure of the databases anymore AND the database administrators had some ability to change the structure without reprogramming the applications.
However, relational gave up some important data relationships which really were necessary; e.g. the idea that if one instance of a record type existed, then there must be one or more of a particular second record type. They spent a lot of effort adding data design semantics back into relational that had been in CODASYL on day one. Some of it isn't pretty.
Now, there is an outright recognition that some data should not be kept in relational stores, thus, we see products called nosql and we see non-relational in-memory datastores like Redis (great product).
A person can either be "above the fray" looking down on what is going on and helping direct the traffic. Or a person can be a cog, with their head down taking directions to find out what the next project will be.
The first person is an engineer with a lot more education that computer science.
Good points. Do engineering/math/physics and pick up the programming on the side like we did.
“I would also push her towards a good State school...they are much cheaper
and have infinitely better engineering and science programs than most
small lib-arts schools, which tend to be private. The Engineering
departments tend to be a-political, so you don’t have to worry about
indoctrination...that will come from the outside campus.”
I have a 12 year old niece I’m helping plan for. she wants to be a lawyer, but Ive told her do a engineering undergrad, ten law school and rule the world.
The greatest opportunity for liberal indoctrination is when the child lives on campus to be totally immersed in that culture. Avoid having the child live on campus at all instead of with family - which also cuts the cost of college in half.
I believe an engineering and law combination would qualify you as a patent lawyer
My grand daughter is also an alumnus of Truman State - she had a full scholarship and graduated a couple of years ago.
Truman State is located North West of St. Louis, Missouri and only slightly west of Jefferson City, which I consider Mid Missouri-anything west of Jefferson City I describe as West, although it might be more accurate to say nearly midpoint or something. I definitely wouldn’t describe it as a North Eastern Missouri location. But if that floats your boat row with it.
Link above is to a map showing the location relative to St. Louis, Kansas City and Jefferson City.
One place to study Chinese is Ole Miss. The out of state tuition is expensive, but they’ve got an excellent Chinese program as well as computer science.
>> FPGA’s that Intel is baking into our current generation CPU sockets
That’s cool. I suppose you’ll be getting some IP with that?
>> “There is nothing new under the sun”.
Perhaps the same but different...
Over the last 40 years, We’ve seen software tooling evolve with both greater complexity and simplicity broadening the opportunities for a wider range of contributors. Just consider the unique skill sets required to support FPGA development and Cloud computing — two completely distinct engineering areas with dozens of development domains in between. And not to exclude the emerging Model Driven Development which is now used in manufacturing & research, and will eventually extend into general use over the next 10 years.
These are exciting times for software development. But unfortunately, there’s a shortage of young adults in training. It’s a problem, and the Department of Energy is hoping to awaken the education sector.
My first advice directly to you and your daughter is to look at the curriculum for CS wherever she is considering attending.
Choose a school where they are accepted for their major. Some universities make you apply to the school of XYZ after two year. You might not get in. But worse than that, you aren’t touching your chosen field for 2 years!
Your major should be deeply entrenched in your studies pretty quickly.
Second, I would grade the CS program by whether they are on the leading edge of technology. I wouldn’t send my kid to a school that wasn’t aggressive in machine learning / cognitive computing / artificial intelligence. That is where the next generation of superstars are rising. It is being applied to everything from analytics, to prediction, risk management, computer vision, etc.
Learn the hard things in CS, because that is where you become valuable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.