Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!yale!bunker!stpstn!aad
From: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Unix editors
Message-ID: <1932@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jul 88 16:03:01 GMT
References: <272@jackson.UUCP> <810021@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Organization: The Stepstone Corporation, Sandy Hook, CT
Lines: 49

In article <810021@hpsemc.HP.COM> gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz ) writes:
>whh@pbhya.PacBell.COM (Wilson Heydt) writes:
>>requirements out of Stanford a few months ago) that College undergraduate
>>curricula should be considered to be 5 years rather than 4.
>    Sorry, I don't go along with this at all.   It was tough enough for
>me to get my 4 years in, paying my own way.  If you make it 5 years, you
>either have to subsidize it, or you prevent all but the most fortunate of
>students from gaining the degree.

I graduated from CMU in December.  I'm paying for it until 1998.

>   Also, I don't believe that 5 years is necessary.  I am an engineer 
>at HP, and I am a reasonably competent software engineer.  I had 6 months 
>of computer training at a trade school.  The rest I learned on the job.  

>   I think that motivation is really the key.  I taught myself Pascal,
>and have taught it at HP.  I taught myself C, etc.   I taught myself 
>Fortran and then consulted on customer conversions from Fortran 66 to 
>Fortran 77.  My original training was Cobol, RPG II, and IBM Assembler.
>I picked up enough VI to do my work in about a week.  In 4 years, students
>should have plenty of time to learn multiple editors (even write their own).

>   Some students are incompetent to work as "programmers" upon graduation.
>Who knows why?  Maybe they really aren't inspired by any field, and they
>just took CS because it was a guaranteed job at the end?

The CMU CS department does not offer a CS undergraduate degree.  The reason
publicly given is that they don't feel you can learn enough about "Computer
Science" in 4 years to warrant a degree.  So I, just like everyone else,
got my degree in "Applied Math/CS track".  My experience there was that
the whole education, and indeed "Computer Science" as I perceive it, has
little or nothing to do with computers anymore.  You spend your time
writing large quantities of capital sigmas with ellipsis between them,
and learn very little about computers.  I know about things like virtual
memory not because my OS course taught it, but because I read the book
(Dinosaur).  I work now as a System Administrator, and I can say with
all honesty that absolutely nothing I do has anything to do with any class
I ever took in college.  It's all based on what I did on my jobs during
school, and the hacking around I did instead of doing my graph theory
homework.

At CMU at least, it's the case that students often can't find time
to sleep, not to mention explore.  They're too busy attempting
near-impossible homework.  Still, I occasionally wake up with the dread fear
that I slept through a test or forgot to turn in homework.-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34)
beak is								  beak is not
Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad