Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
Originally Posted by intparent
I find their splitting of the intro CS classes up especially interesting. My D hadn't coded much at all before college, and it was great for her to have an intro course where she wasn't trampled by kids who had been loading Linux on their machines at age 11. And after the first semester, the tracks merge and she has done fine in her CS courses.


My DD had the same experience in her CS major-- the real problem was that there was such incredible hostility from fellow (98% male) students-- and from first year faculty advisors, who were also male and dismissive of anything resembling "well-rounded" interests.

In fact, the two different advising specialists that she saw openly SCOFFED at her interests outside of engineering/CS. She was treated like a space alien in her CS and engineering courses-- a highly desirable one, to be sure, being a Real Live Girl and all-- but it was lonely and marginalizing.
Many people whose job title is not "programmer", "developer", or "software engineer" do a lot of programming. If your daughter learned some programming, likes it, and is taking that skill to some other field, her leaving computer science may not be a loss. I never took a programming class in college or grad school, and had only a course in BASIC in high school, but I have been able to do jobs that require programming. Lots of financial traders have hacked together VBA scripts for Excel, having never programmed before. Nowadays many use Python, R, and Matlab as well.