Learning from mistakes in computer science degree...

#1 The biggest mistake with academic endeavors is to not take them as seriously as you should. If you're finding it easy or only difficult in procrastination spurts, then you're doing it wrong. You will make mistakes in CS. That's one of the key points of learning. You make mistakes, learn how to correct them, and hope not to make them as badly the next time.

Do every extra-credit or "just extra" assignment you can. That way you can do more coding, make more mistakes, and learn how to correct them.

Memorize the theory in-so-far as you will need it in the coursework. In the industry, you will rarely be asked to do a complex, memorized formula in an interview. However, they may give you a simple formula like matrix math and ask you how best to optimize it off the cuff, knowing that you would do a much better job with research, but wanting to see how you approach a problem in the moment.

Work with others. This means actively working with them, not doing their work or letting them do yours. By actively working in teams (versus passively letting your teams work around you), you will be preparing for working with teams in the real world. While your college classmates will take a severe amount of BS from each other, employers and co-workers will take substantially less.

No program is a perfect preparation for the real world, and no journey through a program can be perfectly mitigated. Just like no project in the real world goes as smoothly as the initial planning phase would project. There is always found work, change-of-course, team overhaul and rotations, etc. In a CS course, especially one that will take 8 years, you will be subject to a number of shifts.

It may be political:
engineering has control of the CS course this year, but math is vying for control of it next year...but the business department is also in the mix for control with their CIS management track...who will win the cage match? Professor W is leaving his Fortran class track behind and Professor X is planning on implementing it in C, while grad student A is really gung-ho about Python and Professor Y is teaching web-based programming with ASP and VisualBasic even though he really wants to move to PHP and Ruby, but can't get departmental buy-in. Meanwhile Grad Student B and Professor Z are working with the GIS department, sociology and biology departments on large-scale GIS datasets, population statistics, and bioinformatics in Hadoop servers scaling via Hadoop, MongoDB, Python, C, and Ruby.

It may be retirement-based:
Professor X's curriculum for Cobol has served the business world extremely well, keeping jobs in the financial world stable through the massive flux of degrading hardware and decades of custom financial programming. But Professor Y's teaching of Java to convert, maintain, and update custom Cobol code and manage large, antiquated custom datasets is the direction the university wants to go.

It may be "hot topic" based (which is still rather slow in academia):
We should stop teaching C++ and concentrate on C#. I know I said this about Java last year, but C# is really proving itself to be much more friendly and widespread every day!

The winds will change while you're there. You need to be agile, adapt, and most of all learn as much as you can. Never turn in an assignment late. Never procrastinate.

When I was asked by a national honor society how I had a 4.0 in grad school, I said:

1) Show up.
2) Do the work.

That's really it. Most of the other grad students had lower marks than me, and they were a whole lot smarter than I am. But I showed up everyday and did the work, regardless of working a full time job and holding a 20 hour contracting gig here at GG at the time.

#2 Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn...repeat...

You will NEVER stop learning in the CS field...ever. Most fields are like this, and if it isn't you are as high as you will go.

Code, code, code, code...repeat...

You will learn way more about programming writing a real app than doing exercises in class. Do BOTH constantly. They reinforce each other. My background is actually EE. However, I have been programming for years and took a few CS classes.

IMO, the best learning language is Python. It allows you to write code that looks like pseudo code that can be extremely abstract. Then you can take that code and write it in C++. That will help you understand the CS topic AND 2 languages at once. Both will extremely valuable. Also, take a compiler course if they have a decent one. It will cover so many topics relative to CS besides writing a compiler.

#3 David Montgomery-Blake

Thank you for the point about focus and the nature of the educational realm in regard to CS. My focus and perspective were straying into things I judged as important but in fact were not. The information regarding the interview situation and expectations on both sides was extremely helpful. Answered a lot of questions I had built up in the brain over the years, in other cut through a lot of elements that caused confusion.

Thank you. The home truths delivered in your response are invaluable.I would have been lost for a lot longer without them. If I could thank you anymore I would. Thank you!!!


Demolishun

Again the brass tax truth is the most helpful. Unbelievably important to me this information is. Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart. I am actually fond of both python and C++. I learned how to integrate scripting in python on top of C++ a while ago but forgot it. Need to go back over it like a lot of stuff, thankfully the learning never stops. I will definitely be taking the compiler portion of the course, I think that is next term or possibly the next one after. Either way it will be taken and I am looking forward to it. Thank you once again. Thank you.