Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!yamauchi
From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Student preparedness
Message-ID: <1988Dec18.163258.14444@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 88 21:32:58 GMT
References: <4893@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <6435@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <1988Dec16.153701.8316@cs.rochester.edu> <499@mccc.UUCP>
Reply-To: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 45

In article <499@mccc.UUCP> pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) writes:
>
>The problem with letting students decide what they should study is that
>there are those who are not open-minded enough to explore areas that are
>suggested to them.  My students say, "I like electronics.  Why do I have
>to take English or a Humanities elective?"  I haven't found an answer
>that satisfies them because they already aren't interested.
>
>-- 
>Pete Holsberg                   UUCP: {...!rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh
>Mercer College			CompuServe: 70240,334
>1200 Old Trenton Road           GEnie: PJHOLSBERG
>Trenton, NJ 08690               Voice: 1-609-586-4800


	This is true, but is it necessarily a problem?  When I was an
undergrad at Carnegie Mellon I knew many CS & engineering students who
hated humanities and social science.  They were forced to take one
humanities / social science / fine arts course each semester and the
only thing they tended to learn was that they hated it.

	Personally, I took more than the required number of these
courses.  I took the courses which looked interesting to me, including
courses which had nothing to do with my major (applied math / computer
science) -- courses such as Filmmaking I & II and Fiction Writing.

	If we had been given *more* freedom in selection of courses --
in particular if the number of required math courses were reduced
slightly, I probably would have taken courses that were both more
diverse (philosophy, music composition) and more specialized (computer
vision, advanced AI) and more diverse and more specialized
(interactive fiction, computer animation).

	In my opinion, the most important thing is not that students
take the courses that are suggested to them, but that they feel free
to take whatever courses interest them.  It was amusing that whenever
I told other students that I was taking a filmmaking course I would
get one of two reactions -- either "Neat!" or "But, but, but you're a
computer science major!  Why are you taking a film course?"

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				University of Rochester
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Computer Science Department
_______________________________________________________________________________