Hi!
1. Can you vaguely give more context on what kind of CS degree you had? Like the type of school or relative reputation?
2. Assuming you did a common 4 year CS major, how do you compare the amount and significance of hands on projects you did in college vs at Hack Reactor?
3. Have you noticed any changes in the bar for the cohort?.i.e. are the cohorts small because people who aren't qualified are moving to the 19 week? or is it smaller AND you feel like they are letting in people maybe who are borderline ready.
u/Lonely_Swing_89 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hello!
1. I went to a state school, that had an "average at best" computer science program.
2. The experience I got from doing hands-on projects at HR blows anything I did in college out of the water. Particularly group projects and using Git
3. The bar was still fairly high in
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Thanks!
Yeah I have to say I never had to use source code control in school, which is crazy haha! But I did extremely significant projects, several courses you spent the whole 4 months semester doing a project and learning how to do pieces of it properly (e.g. build a robotic assembly line from scratch, build a computer processor on an FPGA, build a prototype from ideation stage with scientifically proper user research, open ended thesis project that won Best Paper at the top HCI conference) and that's just 5 courses lol.
u/Lonely_Swing_89 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah, those are some great projects for sure. My school and the other state schools did not have coursework like that. Did you go to a top school? Or above average at least? I assume the level of school is the key factor here.
I also didn't do any internships. Seems like employe
u/michaelnovatireplied·
University of Toronto - Engineering Science (which is a somewhat unique program) but yeah it's a "top 3 school" in Canada at least. I would say comparable to Berkeley here.
u/Livid-Cup-7006 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It's the number 1 school in canada. It's comparable to Harvard.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
So for SWE and CS in the market, I would say Waterloo is #1 because of the co-op program. UofT is more academic and is the #1 academic school. I was going to my PhD after because I was primed for academics yeah.
In full transparency Engineering Science itself is a program within UofT that is the hardest program in the country to get into and the lowest 1/3 of people need to switch out of after first year (not sure if this changed), roughly tied with McMaster's Pre-Med program. So it's fair to say I did have a very good college experience and I only paid $5,000 a year for it at the time.
I don't like really touting on paper things like this vs factual statements about what people do vs credentials, but I think it's fair to disclose this in this context.