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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> Sunny Balwani is an entrepreneur and a computer scientist. Sunny joined Theranos after dropping out of the Computer Science program at Stanford University. He received his MBA at UC Berkeley and undergraduate degree from UT Austin.

Honest question, can you claim to be a Computer Scientist if you drop out from a computer Science program ? To me it sounds like calling yourself a Doctor after dropping out following the first year of Medicine Studies.

Needless to say, this smells of arrogance more than anything else.

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Sounds like he dropped out of a graduate degree from Stanford. If his undergrad degree from UT Austin he might have a plausible fig leaf to go around calling himself "a computer scientist". Though I certainly wouldn't call somebody who with just an undergraduate degree a "scientist" in any field unless they've proven themselves by practicing such science in a credible manner for a reasonable period of time.

I prefer an operational definition: a scientist is somebody who does research using the scientific method. But then again, this eliminates a bunch of CS people, since they're mostly doing math and engineering.

Me too. Hence the "practicing such science" part in my comment. University degrees such as Master of Science/Doctor of Philosophy etc. are meant to provide validation from universities that the holder of such degrees has had some training in the discipline but it's by no means a requirement to be a scientist (Leonardo da Vinci certainly didn't have a PhD).

In theory, yes. But when it comes to highly specialized topics, there are a number of things that are very hard to learn on your own (at least for now) without going through an academic path. Chemistry, Biology, pretty much require hands-on experience as part of your education - and you can't do that kind of things from home or simply by reading books.

You can teach an 8-year kid the scientific method so they can "do science" with household chemicals. Probably they won't discover anything novel, but assuming they don't look at the internet it will be new to them and that's the important bit: reasoning about truth on the basis of experimental observation.

> Honest question, can you claim to be a Computer Scientist if you drop out from a computer Science program ?

Yes, absolutely. Plenty of luminaries in computer science don't have actual CS degrees.

I would think many computer scientists without a CS degree would still hold a degree in a field that would provide a solid basis for CS research (engineering or mathematics, possibly other sciences that require higher maths to be completed). There are probably a few that have little to no classical education but these exceptions are likely outliers.

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