TITLE: CS Students Should Take Their Other Courses Seriously, Too
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 18, 2023 11:16 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
(These days, I'm posting a bit more on Mastodon. It has a higher
character limit than Twitter, so I sometimes write longer posts,
including quoted passages. Those long posts start to blur in
length and content with blog posts. In an effort to blog more,
and to preserve writing that may have longer value than a social
media post provides, I may start capturing threads there as blog
posts here. This post originated as
a Mastodon post
last week.)
~~~~~
This post
contains one of the reasons I tell prospective CS students to take
their humanities and social science courses seriously:
In short, the key skill for making sense of the world of information
is developing the ability to accurately and neutrally summarize some
body of information in your own words.
The original poster
responded
that it wasn't until going back to pursue a master's degree in
library and information science that this lesson hit home for him.
I always valued my humanities and social science courses, both because
I enjoyed them and because they let me practice valuable skills that
my CS and math courses didn't exercise. But this lesson hit home for
me in a different way after I became a professor.
Over my years teaching, I've seen students succeed and struggle in a
lot of different ways. The ability to read and synthesize information
with facility is one of the main markers of success, one of the things
that can differentiate between students who do well and those who
don't. It's also hard to develop this skill after students get to
college. Nearly every course and major depends on it, even technical
courses, even courses and majors that don't foreground this kind of
skill. Without it, students keep falling farther behind. It's hard to
develop the skill quickly enough to not fall so far behind that success
feels impossible.
So, kids and parents, when you ask
how to prepare to succeed as a CS student
while in high school, one of my answers will almost always be: take
four years of courses in every core area, including English and
social science. The skills you develop and practice there will pay
off many-fold in college.
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