Preparing for a Computer Science Degree

ha so I know I'm a little late on this video for those of you who just started a computer science degree last two or three weeks but let's just pretend that I'm early for those who are about to start their computer science degree in the spring or maybe next fall or a few years from now so let's just let's just go with that in my set if you will looking a little different than it normally does that is because I took everything from right here and moved to downstairs one because I was a little bored and kind of wanted to but two because supposedly we in my area in southern Virginia Beach had a mandatory evacuation for hurricane Florence now today is Saturday I believe when the hurricane is still causing uproar within the Carolinas prayers go out to all of y'all but for us it diverted south and missed us almost completely we just had a few little like lightning or tornado lightning storms if that's even a real term I don't know but we don't normally get tornadoes here on the coast of the United States the East Coast that is so what I'm gonna do is just stand all right and that's like so make sure I'm in focus in coffee and now we're ready to go so I don't want this video to be about me preparing you for a computer science degree I'm teaching you how to prepare yourself for a computer science degree so we're going to talk about a few broad topics that I know you'll be able to fit into your life in order to help prepare you for that computer science degree so let's get started point number one actually applies to college as a whole but especially computer science and that is learning how to learn when you go into a computer science degree sure you're building that foundation of particular languages particular tools and technologies but what you're really doing is you're learning how to learn you're proving to a potential employer that you know how to put your head down and learn a new language or a new tool or some type of skill said that you will need in the workforce although you have office hours in school you can't just turn to your Wester for every little problem you may have just like you can't turn to a co-worker or some type of upper management for every problem you have in your career because then what what can you really do what can you provide for them if you're asking people every little problem that you run into so when you're in your college career you need to make sure that you try for one to three hours you've exhausted all opportunities online to fix a particular bug or problem in your program or whatever class you're taking before you go to your office hours you want to make sure that you actually understand the problem at hand and you just simply can't figure out the solution and now you're trying to learn that solution from your professor so now that you have the mindset of learning how to learn my best point I can give you for preparing you for your computer science degree is actually taking a look into your computer science degree so I'm sure you have some type of college or a list of colleges that you would like to go to realistically like to go to so what you want to do is go on their website go to their CS program and look at their CS courses and mandatory courses for your computer science degree at that school so they'll have a list of math courses that you need to take a list of labs that you have that you can take and then a list of computer science courses and so on and so forth you want to take a look at those courses specifically the computer science courses and study up on those before you ever take those as a matter of fact I want to give you a better look a more specific look into what I'm talking about here so allow me to set up my laptop screen record this so you can actually see what I want you to do so what I've done is navigated to their course requirements for my computer science degree and if you scroll down here you can see the required classes and we want to take a look at the 100 level courses so as you can see we have problem solving a programming one and fundamentals of computer organization basically we want to come over to the actual course descriptions one of those courses was cs150 problem solving and programming one and we want to read that description introduction to computer based problem solving and programming in C++ topics included problem-solving methodologies program design algorithm development and testing C++ language concepts include variables yada yada yada so basically we're getting into the basics of C++ in this course and that's what we want to study up on before we get into computer science degree so that makes sense right basically you want to look at the courses you're going to be taking at school read the descriptions for those courses for your first and/or second semester and then prepare yourself basically what that description lays out you can actually find some of those courses online because a lot of that information is displayed online publicly you just can't access particulars and obviously you won't make it great on it for studying it on your own so that's what I mean by get a head start on your classes this is essentially the same ideology of actually doing well in your classes I should go over it more so in my concrete math as a computer science student I linked up right there basically you have a class that your teacher lets you know all right we're going to be going over chapter 2.3 and 2.4 next class so what you want to do as a good student you want to open up your book read over 2.3 and 2.4 maybe try some of those problems that are listed at the end of that chapter and you may get them wrong that's normal but what will happen is when you go into that class when they discuss chapters 2.3 and 2.4 your your teacher will start talking about particular problems that you faced and you're going to have those aha moments in class so that's basically what this is but starting even earlier to actually prepare you for your whole entire degree on a course-by-course basis instead of going one class at a time like that example just laid out all right so this next point may leave you scratching your head but I want you to bear with me and hear me out okay computer science isn't about programming what it's really about is how to solve problems using the basic algorithmic tools of recursion of dynamic programming the use of data structures like stacks queues trees so on and so forth so the sooner you realize that basically anybody can program but not everybody can solve problems with their programming language the better off you'll be and don't get me wrong programming itself is a skill but if you can't actually use that skill to solve any problems and what what good are you you're not really worth your salt at that point so what you need to make sure you're able to do is solve these problems theoretically so then you can practically solve the problems with whatever language or tool that your company uses and all this really brings me back to my first point and that is having that learning mindset of learning how to learn because you will always build and have that foundation of problem-solving but if you aren't able to learn a particular language faster and better than the next guy then you just may be out of a job so know that learning how to learn new programming languages and tools or whatnot is a huge skill set but also understanding that computer science isn't just programming that's what you need to wrap your head around for those of you who want to learn more and still have more questions there are a few things you can do one it would be subscribe to the channel because I'll be making more computer science topic videos just like this one and plenty of others on my channel I actually leave a link to my computer science topic playlist in the description below followed by a few resources that I think will help you out I'll list a few free resources I'll list a few may be better paid resources maybe some books or some online courses those will be linked down below as well and if there's anything specific that you think I can answer leave that as a comment down in the comment section below and I read every single comment so if you have a good question I'll definitely get back to you if you have a really good question I may make a whole entire video out of it so don't be shy leave that down there like this video if you made it this far in the video till next time guys have a good one peace [Music] you

Channel: ForrestKnight

Views: 119,519

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Id: S7MDDPeS258

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 16 2018