Comment by icpmacdo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icpmacdo | Hacker News Reader

Prefacing this I am only 20 years old so I have some time to figure it all out but I feel like I am missing out a fair bit on not pursuing a degree in computer science. A lot of the content, especially the focus on algorithms, seems really interesting to me.

Straight out of high school I did not have the math grades for CS so I went to the American equivalent of community college and am on track to get a diploma from an IT related course thats basically going to amount to a web dev job in the future. If I decided to go that route for lets say 5 years to save some money would it be a hindrance career wise, because of a large time gap in the resume, to take the 4 years off to get a CS degree from a decent school, say Waterloo?

The biggest point of fear is that I would not be able to complete the degree and realizing it was to above my cognitive abilities.

You do not need to be in college to study CS. If that is really what you want to do, you should make a point to start now.

Time spent in university isn't usually seen as a gap. Most employers would admire that your chose to go back to school so you could really understand the fundamentals.

Right now, I'm prepping for a Computer Science degree. I find I just can't study mathematics at a pace that's as fast as a Uni course goes. I really find I need to understand the underlying concepts of the math, so it takes me a bit longer but I seem to be able to hold a lot more info, and my progress is getting quicker.

As an example, it took me some time to grasp that the determinant is the size of a square matrix, and that a one-dimensional matrix gives the distance, a two dimensional matrix gives the area of a parallelogram, and a three dimensional matrix gives the volume of a parallelopiped. After that it became easier to understand how to get the determinant of an n-dimensional matrix.

Same with vectors and trigonometry.

I'm finding that self study with a little help from Google is really paying off!

You will regret not going later. If you have the interest, computer science can offer staggering amounts of enlightenment.

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