Ask HN: Getting a CS "degree" via MIT OpenCourseWare?
I want a proper CS education, but I messed up my high school and theres no way I'm getting into any good schools locally.
I was discussing with my parents and thinking of dedicating a few years to signing up and passing a full CS degree curriculum via MIT OpenCourseWare. I'm currently a mobile consultant and have been in the field for awhile, I'm mainly doing this to get some sort of accreditation in my field beyond just high school and university is out of the picture and to get a more in depth proper understanding of computer science.
I want to be able to take a complex problem and design an elegant solution to it. Right now I'm just a code monkey with no real world application beyond "code this according to spec".
How would potential employers view this?
Has anyone done this before and been hired?
28 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 69.6 ms ] threadBut I am very interested what others think on this topic as well, so please up vote.
"No registration, no enrollment, and no grades or credits are offered" from http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/
But It is worthing to spend time on online courses now. I have finished some courses on https://www.coursera.org/ and https://www.udemy.com. I can always learn from the best. I finished my Bachelor's degree and Master's degree more than a decade ago. If I were able to access those course at that time, I wouldn't go to schools to waste my time and my parents' and my money. But that's a personal choice.
And I don't think my degrees matter much for job seeking nowadays. You can easily demonstrate your abilities by developing apps or contributing to Open Source projects.
Also, even today there are a number of companies (esp. in the midwest) that won't let any open source software inside, unless it comes from a paid vendor (like Red Hat).
It's a pretty meaningless statement to say "in the real world, no one cares about open source" when your definition of "real world" is one fraction of one fraction of the real world (specific companies within the corporate world).
Actually, now that I think of it, this may not be a strictly regional thing, except that certain industry types cluster around specific areas. I think it is more if a company sees its software as a competitive advantage, then they are more likely to go out on a limb to try to differentiate themselves. Whereas companies that see software as similar to a phone system, or electricity, they are usually only interested in traditional big-company that-you-can-contractually-blame software. At least that has been my experience around here.
I don't claim that in order to work at <set A of companies> you should do open source. I only claim that doing open source will help you get a job at <set B of companies>. Those two sets are not the same.
While MIT might offer good courses, they're designed to be tough for a very select group of the best prepared students even with the support resources such as Teaching Assistants and labs and peer students and professors with office hours that are accessible only on campus. Without those, it can only be tougher. In my opinion, tougher to the level that a multi-year project has a low chance of success even for a person of above average motivation and intelligence.
Personally, I think a CS education from an average school will probably better prepare anyone motivated enough to have a chance of completing a full slate of MIT courses as self study. You can always get a graduate degree someplace more selective.
Not if you want a CS degree, which WGU doesn't offer (WGU does offer a variety of IT degrees, which may be an acceptable substiture, or even the preferred option for some people, but its certainly not even remotely the same thing as a CS degree.)
But if we're just talking about credentials, then a relevant degree plus experience gives anyone who wants to hire the OP a green light.
The difference is important if the concern is about credentials, too; when the concern is about credentials, then exactly what the degree is in can be very important.
CS and IT mean different things, including (perhaps especially) to people who are evaluating credentials. (In some cases, IT may be preferred, in other cases, CS may be.)
https://www.edx.org/xseries
1. make sure your local state university offers cheap tuition to residents
2. make sure they accept credit transfers from community colleges, get it in writing
3. do 1-2 years in community college
4. transfer those to the state university and do the final years there at the cheaper tuition rate
You'd then exit with a solid computer science degree on the cheap. Speaking as someone from outside the USA most of the state universities are highly regarded.
Another option might be a BSc in Computing and Information Systems (does this count as CS to purists? does that matter if you aren't going on to higher studies?) from the University of London, Goldsmiths in this case, for just under 5000 pounds.[1]
However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere. The lowest risk option in that case is to perhaps take some uncredited core CS curriculum from OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity and edX over 2014 and just see how you go. Then, if it works out, you will then be in a position to blitz a credited distance, community/state or online option that might arise in 2015+. The risk, at least in terms of "money on the line", of the community college moving to state university option is fairly low as well.
Finally, as someone with graduate degrees and who is working on a PhD in a different discipline to CompSci, I'd say you shouldn't get too caught up in worrying about degrees if it doesn't match up with you personally. There are reasonable, although often smaller than claimed or imagined, financial and personal benefits from doing a degree though and you should take another shot, or two, at it to make sure it's not for you (so long as the risk is low regarding debt, there is virtually no risk in watching lectures and reading textbooks as the time spent won't be wasted).
[1]http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/g... The courses seem perhaps a tad dry but it seems to cover the core mathematics, statistics, databases, algorithms and has some nice looking electives.
It was low level introductory programming like basic C, PHP, navigating the UNIX filesystem, writing bash scripts, some simple database work. It's stuff I've already done before and didn't find challenging, wasn't worth it.
I'm not in the States and England is out of the question as well.
Or you could take the foundations of comp sci from edX[1] and/or the credited Coursera courses[2](you won't be getting a CS degree without at least a reasonable amount of maths and stats) with a view to 1) completing a degree mostly that way over the next few years as more like them become available with a finishing year or two somewhere that accepts the credits, or 2) using just a few of those courses and a reference/letter to gain mature entry to UoT (bypassing highschool requirements) or something like that with the understanding being that if you can motivate yourself to complete them, then you will be able to complete UoT and it will therefore be worth the money in increased earning capacity.
[1]https://www.edx.org/xseries
[2]http://blog.coursera.org/post/42486198362/five-courses-recei...
The two options I used, that covered one year of school for me, in about 4 months... CLEP and DANTES.
CLEP - http://clep.collegeboard.org DANTES - http://getcollegecredit.com
the tl;dr version: take exam on $SUBJECT, pass exam, get credit.
The fine print:
a. the exams cost money, typically $100 - 150
b. there is typically a limit on how many credit-by-exam credits a receiving institution will accept (for me, it was 30 semester hours, or 1 year's worth) - for how many and which credits you can get - you need to research with the receiving institution!!!
c. Usually, these are NOT easy exams, but the margin for passing exams varies, but typically it's a ridiculously low margin, like 50-60%. I guess the rationale is that the average college student retains only 50-60% of the material they were taught, at best. (my conjecture, not fact!)
TOTALLY doable!!!
Also, at my school, which was a mediocre local university, I believe you still needed 70% to pass an examination for accreditation.
The only thing university admissions required was some kind of high school equivalency and ACT or SAT scores. I took the GED and ACT, and my scores exceeded placement requirements by a huge margin. Your mileage may vary outside of the US.
Are you certain you don't meet admissions requirements for any nearby universities? Have you checked, or are you just assuming?
If you can do several passion projects of your own, no GOOD employer would discredit you.
But I recommend, double down. Create something you love (no business intention behind it) while taking the MIT course.
Depends on location. Markets in SF and NY particularly are very strong. Maybe don't try this in Tennessee.