Advice for Computer Science majors?

akhbhaat
Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:39:53 +0000

1.) Don’t procrastinate.

2.) Don’t procrastinate.

3.) Don’t procrastinate.

4.) In later classes and on larger projects, be a bit of a perfectionist. For algorithms problems (in upper level courses), step through your solution several times. Always review your test answers before you turn them in!

For any project that involves programming, make sure you beat the hell out of your error checking/exception handling code and try to think of and account for every reasonable use case scenario. For example: I got an initial grade of 25/100 on an otherwise near-flawless custom data structure project once because I forgot to write a default case (one line of code in ~1000) for a switch statement and the thing seg faulted in the first suite of test cases that the TA ran it through. Turns out that one of the test cases violated the assumptions given to us to follow in the project write up, so I ended up with a 95 after I talked to the prof about it–but that could easily have happened on a legitimate test case, which would’ve seriously damaged my entire course grade.

Obviously, to do this you need to leave yourself a bit of time, which leads to…

5.) Don’t procrastinate.

The only class I got away with it in was Programming I, because I was one of the ones who “got it” and already had some programming experience going in. The projects get exponentially more difficult (or exponentially longer) as you progress through the degree program.