Posted on 12/29/2016 9:02:04 PM PST by Tai_Chung
My son from Clemson works with several Missouri S&T graduates, in Huntsville, AL.
Unless a student knows unequivocally what s/he wants to do with his/her degree and unless s/he has scholarships or wealthy parents who can fully fund their college, I’m a proponent of Community College. Cost is definitely reasonable. The student can study a wide variety of subjects to get a feel for what works for him/her. And, by the time they get to the 4 year college/university they should be more mature and better able to handle the classes and social environment there.
Most, if not all, state and private colleges/universities accept community colleges transfers, depending on courses completed and grades.
And FYI....the French minor is a complete and utter waste of time and money; she'll NEVER use it and NO French firm will hire here to work over there.
Does she want to learn to speak french, read french literature, learn french history?
Has she taken any steps or done any preparation or is she starting from dot?
The reason I ask is because students usually switch minors.
I would recommend that if she really wants to learn french she takes it as a summer class.
She has already been accepted to several schools and some of them won’t offer scholarships until the spring.
Unfortunately, her major has changes since August.
She went from French major to French/Education double-major to Computer Science/French double-major to Computer Science and French minor. She’s in her 2nd year of programming in high school and seems to be a natural.
She has been accepted to Arkansas, Kansas, Drury, Monmouth, University of Illinois in Chicago, Valparaiso University, and Lake Forest College.
Yes, it is a little late to start thinking of other schools, but I thought some advice wouldn’t hurt.
Amy of the military academies?
The Muzzie rapists are in full swing, Germany is more PC than the UK and America...which is saying something, and the travel costs are extremely high.
She wants French language, not history or literature. That’s the main reason she dropped it as a major and selected it as a minor. She is currently in French V in High School.
I agree with the community college route to avoid debt. The last two years is all employers will see.
I went the community college route because my mother was a professor there and my tuition was free. My physics, chemistry and calculus was superior to the state university by a factor of 10. My university roommate had his classmates over so I could explain physics and various mathematics. They got 5 past physics final exams as study aids and could not do them. I did all five in less than an hour and they were ridiculously easy.
Don’t rule out community college as a good start. You may want to inquire about their class scores on the American Chemical Society (ACS) exam which is nation wide and a good way to evaluate science programs.
My Grandson says he sees very few Muslims in Heidelberg and that he would rather walk the streets of most German cities than the streets around most colleges in the US.
My son went to Whitworth Universiy in Spokane. With jobs, grants and student loans he graduated in 3 1/2 years with a theology major and minors in German, leadership studies and philosophy. This is a real deal small Christian college and is very highly regarded. I’m pretty sure they had a bunch of computer science graduates in May. We are extremely thankful that Whitworth and our son found each other!
The French minor is a complete, utter, TOTAL waste of time and money.
If she wants a double major, or even an interesting minor, there must be SOMETHING else she can find. Double majors ain't easy...my progeny did that and did it well, but the majors were connected and French & IT most assuredly are like mixing pre-Med with basket weaving. ;^)
Over 15 years ago my son and I visited a top rated engineering school which would have matched his major. I talked him out of it solely on the fact that the undergrads were not allowed to get to the library stacks. They were required to submit requests based on the card catalog.
I remembered when I was in engineering school, at University of Oklahoma, spending hours in the stacks examining books on math, science, and engineering in order to find explanations which met my needs. Many times I would find books outside of the discipline at hand which caught my eye and led to interesting explorations.
It’s like paper dictionaries from which I would typically learn many more words than the one which led me to pick up the book.
I just can’t imagine going to school and not being able to browse the library stacks.
BTW: Examine the curriculum and avoid those which “specialize” or spend a lot of time on the product sets which are popular today; e.g., Big Data. Instead, look for curricula which generalizes.
I have an undergrad degree in electrical engineering from OU and a Masters in Math with a specialty in Computer Science from ASU. I NEVER took a single course devoted to a particular computer language; e.g., FORTRAN. We were always expected to learn the languages on our own.
The only time were were taught “a language” was the class where we were building the compiler for that language.
I led software development for a major computer mainframe company in the areas of database systems, system recovery, and high availability. I have done BIOS development for very large systems. That would be a single system with 16 CPU sockets with hundreds of cores and up to 24 Terabytes of RAM memory. On the other hand, I have also participated in open software development in transaction processing and HPC schedulers. I have presented papers at several international conferences in the U.S. and Europe.
I have written over 15 patents in the U.S. and Europe on hardware and software designs.
So I have been around the block.
It turns out that the same problems and occur over and over at many different levels. For instance, HW CPU cache coherency shares a lot of design issues with distributed database systems.
I have spent a lot of time locating seminal books on the topics which relate to the work that I do. I just purchased Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann published by O’Reilly. Books like that come once every 4 or 5 years, but they are really special. (There are boatloads of books which aren’t worth the paper, but that’s another topic.)
Thus, a generalized education will equip a student to face the next round of problems. While taking classes on Java, Python, and JEE will equip them to deal with technology which will probably be replaced in 20 years.
Send me a private message if you would like further information.
My alma-mater. Not much time for politics. Doubt they have French though!
My son goes to a Christian college - not conservative though. He has been able to withstand it, and has close friends that are conservative. Same with my daughter as a freshman in another college.
After the election one of her college mates said something about how tough it is to be conservative in a place where 70% of the people are liberals. My daughter replied “Heck, where I grew up there were maybe four conservatives that I knew of in a class of 800 - and one of them was my sister! It’s GREAT being here!”
My kiddo was doing second year college French during her senior year at boarding school. That's where it should end...though many colleges require one or two foreign language classes and YES...it IS FRENCH LIT. !
French majors and even minors, in college, MUST do Lit and French history.
Actually, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the school I talked my son out of due to the fact that the undergrads couldn’t browse the library stacks.
Also, does he not go to other German cities, when he can, for fun?
It's just getting SO bad, in Germany, now, from what I read in German news papers on line, I wouldn't want a girl over there now.
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, home of the Bush Presidential Library
Montana State and the University of Idaho are supposed to have very good tech programs....
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