Stanford programming talents are thinning

BigMike3541
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:12:14 +0000

I would agree with what was mentioned in the above post about a lot of it being about who is actually participating in the competitions. I am stanford CS, and the smartest CS major I knew here did nothing but ace his classes and play video games. He really has an incredible mind for algorithms, but we could never convince him to participate in any competitions.

The rest of it is that I think American universities (especially Stanford) don’t create an undergraduate experience that is solely focused on technical matters, which (as I understand it) many of the top technical schools abroad do. I’ll take our more balanced approached to education every time–we may not win every programming competition, but in the long run I imagine its probably a good thing.