Advice to a Junior in High School?

[Sean Ross]

"Howard Nease" <hnease at midsouth.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Ivw2b.1305$Ce2.314 at clmboh1-nws5.columbus.rr.com...
> What should I study in college?

Hi. Are you asking which areas in the field of computer science you should
try to specialize in (take courses in)? Are you asking which comp. sci. (or
non-comp.sci. courses) would be beneficial (for getting work, for rounding
your knowledge, for making you happy, for all of the above and more)?

What you should study in college may well depend on your chosen college's
degree requirements. My university, for instance, requires us to take
atleast 8 classes outside of our discipline (I chose to do a minor in
philosophy, in order to meet that requirement).

It's hard to say what you should study. What are your goals? What would you
like to learn? What would you like to do? Do you want to be a computer
scientist? a programmer? a software engineer? a network administrator? a
security professional? a web-application developer, or something else?
Depending upon what you want to do, what you should learn may differ.

For the time being, you're still in high school, so let's start there. Take
all of the math and science courses you can. Finite (discrete) mathematics,
if it is offered, is particularly useful. If your school offers any kind of
logic course, take that. If you're looking to be in management, business
courses might be useful. Take literature courses (you'll have to write
papers as you move further towards being a computer scientist, best get some
practice writing now). But, most importantly, take what interests you!

In university (or college), you can follow advice similar to that above.
Especially, "take what interests you". Take any required maths, and, if you
like, take any other discrete math courses. As for computer science courses:
You'll likely have a core curriculum to follow for the first 2-3 years, so
you may not have a lot of choice in which courses to take. In 3rd and 4th
year you'll likely get to specialize more. If your school offers a compiler
course, take it. Most of what you learn there is applicable in other
domains. If your school offers an interface design course, take that. If
your school offers software design courses, take those.

Other than this, it's difficult to suggest courses. It depends on your
interests and the courses that are offered. Are you interested in AI,
A-Life, evolutionary computing? Are you interested in cryptography,
security, networking? Are you interested in distributed or parellel
computing? Again, "take what interests you".


> What languages do you suggest that I study (I'm already studying Python)?
Learn C (atleast, and maybe C++). Learn an assembly language. Learn Scheme
(Lisp, Dylan, Haskell, ocaml, or some other functional programming
language). Learn Prolog (or some other logic programming language). Learn
Java. Learn Perl. Learn what interests you.

I hope that was somewhat helpful,
Sean