<p>Hello, I am a senior attending high school. I have just decided to major in computer science, but on most of the information I've been reading, it says colleges recommend a year or so of C or C++. My school does not offer any computer languages; will this affect my chances of getting in a college if I were to declare my major as computer science?</p>
<p>EDIT: The schools I am applying to: UC Davis, UC Irivne, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Cal Poly SLO, Cal Poly Pomona, UC Riverside.</p>
<p>Most high schools don’t offer any programming classes and all colleges with a computer science department offer an introductory programming course w/o programming prerequisites. I just checked UC Davis’ and UC Riverside’s programs and I am confident that this is true for the other universities on your list as well.</p>
<p>Hmmm, will not having programming in HS hurt your chances, um not really. Bad math grades will def hurt as that will be one of the major things they will be looking at for incoming CS majors. Most BS Comp Sci degrees require the Calc I-III, Linear Algebra, Ordinary Differential Equations, etc.</p>
<p>I would make sure you keep your math grades up, take AP, or Calc II if possible, (and if it won’t screw up your GPA)</p>
<p>And possibly work on getting a decent webpage up. You CAN get proficient in HTML in a pretty short time, mix in a little CSS, Javascript and maybe there’s hope.</p>
<p>However, if you are really intent on learning C now, realize that your intent is to learn how to code well, not ridiculously fast. Just spend a reasonable amount of time per day, practicing writing programs. You can find many tutorials online, but I really recommend buying a book because you can only ALT+Tab so many times before it becomes silly.</p>