TITLE: Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 10, 2019 11:06 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred
<A HREF="https://www.netmeister.org/blog/cs-falsehoods.html">
   Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating</A>.
 There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help
 CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too.
 I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my
 mind recently even before reading this list.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled
 after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all
 the time, with never a thought of trimming anything.  Two-line
 messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read
 again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.

 Of course, some of our grads end up in corporate and IT, managing
 email as merely one tool in a suite of lowest-common-denominator
 tools for corporate communication.  The idea of email as a stream
 of text that can, for the most part, be read as such, is gone -- let
 alone the idea that a mail stream can be processed by programs such
 as procmail to great benefit.

 I realize that most users don't ask for anything more than a simple
 Gmail filter to manage their mail experience, but I really wish it
 were easier for more users with programming skills to put those
 skills to good use.  Alas, that does not fit into the corporate IT
 model, and not even the CS grads running many of these IT operations
 realize or care what is possible.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 It's the time of year when students register for spring semester
 courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students.  (Twice as
 many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.)  It's
 interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum
 between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit
 too much.  The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into
 the major at all.  The latter are often more curious but sometimes
 are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific
 course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by
 the time they register.

 I do my best to help them get into these courses, either this
 spring or in a late semester, but I also try to do a little
 teaching along the way.  Students will learn useful and important
 things in just about every course they take, if they want to, and
 taking any particular course does not have to be either the
 beginning or the end of their learning of that topic.  And if the
 reason they think they must take a particular course is because
 future employers will care, they are going to be surprised.  Most
 of the employers who interview our students are looking for
 well-rounded CS grads who have a solid foundation in the discipline
 and who can learn new things as needed.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background
and shared experience/knowledge.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the
 global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph.  Even
 students who take most of the same courses together will usually
 end their four years in the program with very different knowledge
 and experiences.  Students connect with different things in each
 course, and these idiosyncratic memories build on one another in
 subsequent courses.  They participate in different extracurricular
 activities and work different part-time jobs, both of shape and
 augment what they learn in class.

 In the course of advising students over two, three, or four years,
 I try to help them see that their studies and other experiences
 are helping them to become interesting people who know more than
 they realize and who are individuals, different in some respects
 from all their classmates.  They will be able to present themselves
 to future employers in ways that distinguish them from everyone
 else.  That's often the key to getting the job they desire now,
 or perhaps one they didn't even realize they were preparing for
 while exploring new ideas and building their skillsets.
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