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Today marks the final fee deadline for class registration at UCI. I have enrolled in three classes and will be adding myself to the waiting list for a fourth. I’m going to be cutting it extremely close to complete in the next year. I have a gut feeling that I will have to fork over the money for one extra quarter to fit everything that I’m required to complete for my degree. I decided to see what the ratemyprofessor site had to say about my professors this quarter, just for kicks. I have been guessing in my head what my past teachers would have been rated as, but reading the ratings for my new teachers has me a bit worried. Every computer science teacher I read about on ratemyprofessor had the worst reputation. I think this is a paradoxical thing, where computer science people in general are not very social and so when they try to be by teaching they don’t come off as being all there. The other issue, is that most computer people that are truly passionate about what they do often speak very quickly when teaching about various subjects. I know I’m guilty of this, when someone asks me how do you do X? I will often run through it at a million miles an hour and be done explaining the idea in full detail by the time they get out their pad of paper, at which point I have to go through the whole shpiel again. The sad part is by the time you go through it a second time you are a bit flustered that the person didn’t listen the first time and leave out much of the “bonus” knowledge you were willing to share. I think the same is true for computer science teachers. I’ve had two really great teachers that I can recall, both were workers in the field and taught on the side.

The biggest bummer about UCI is that with their scheduling you don’t get to pick your teacher, there is usually a single section of each class available and you have to just roll the dice and see which teacher you get. Saddleback was much more open, they had easily 4-5 sections of each class with different teachers so that you could pick and choose who you wanted to take the class with.

There are several things I find lacking at UCI having been there for a full year now. The first is the number of languages taught to Computer Science students and the inflexibility of professors to allow students to use languages more suited to a given task. Everything has to be JAVA whether you like it or not. This is setting a lot of students up for failure. Java is not the only language in this world and for good reason, if we all had to write Java swing interfaces for every program I’d have shot myself a long time ago. I feel it’s a good language to branch out from because it’s cross platform compatible, but for so many of the projects given to students web languages are much more suited. Another big thing missing in the school is the business side of programming. There are no classes offered on how to start your own programming business or for that matter any independent study class for starting your own business. Something I would really like to see happen at the school would be to have each student pick a large scale project that they will work on for a full year during their upper devision classes that each class can take a little piece of and make that much better. Then when the year is up each student would have some large program that is something they wanted to work on, and can use in their portfolio or to sell. This way each student comes out with something to show for all their hard work, rather than 20 little programs that can sort a CSV file. It’ll be interesting to see what this next year at UCI holds for me.