<p>Majoring in computer science, but don't have priority registration as a freshman and won't be able to start computer science classes until the fall. Not ideal. Seems like everyone wants to take at least one class in CS before they graduate and the incoming CS majors are out of luck. Anyone else?</p>
<p>Change “until the fall” to spring.</p>
<p>CS has rapidly increased in popularity in recent years. So it is not surprising that more students are now trying to get into introductory CS courses (recent enrollments: Berkeley >1000, Stanford >700, Harvard >700, Harvey Mudd ~200).</p>
<p>If your school’s CS department is unable to expand capacity quickly enough, then you may be left out. A LAC committed to small class sizes with no TAs may not have enough faculty to teach the additional students. A research university may be able to hire more TAs, but running out of graduate students to hire as TAs is still a possibility, depending on the size of its PhD program.</p>
<p>What school? It varies even among UCs.</p>
<p>It’s due to small class size. Not a UC. </p>
<p>You might want to talk to the professor and stay on waitlist to see if you get in.</p>
<p>I had that problem for data structures (not exactly intro level), but there were sophomores who couldn’t get into the class because it had not only hit capacity, but the had granted overrides to room capacity. I kept in contact with the department (that was in spring, i am just starting fall of my freshman year), and a couple days before classes was granted an override because enough people dropped. This was also due to class size- there was only one section also. I believe all of our intro classes filled up quickly too. One thing my school does to combat that is it starts the cap lower for senior registration and then opens up new spots for each different registration group. Only problem was they had to grant those overrides though because some of them were kids that had already declared a CS major.</p>
<p>The number of people taking CS classes at my school keeps jumping dramatically. I’m a TA for our intro CS course, and it’s pretty much the hardest “intro-level” course at the university. Last fall there were 330 students in the course. This fall, there are 400. It’s crazy. Because it’s a big university, we can adjust to fit a lot more students from year to year, but almost all of the lab sections are at room capacity right now, so we still couldn’t add on many late-comers at this point.</p>
<p>My school (UT Austin) has 3 times more CS students right now than we did 5 years ago and it’s extremely hard for CS majors to get CS classes now. I’m not a CS major here but I have friends that are and some of them are sophomores and juniors that couldn’t get a single CS class for the semester.</p>
<p>There is an exploding of the CS major in most universities. At my daughter’s school, it double from 2010 to today.</p>
<p>Hmm. Probably means that there will be a tech crash coming soon.</p>
<p>That’s what I’m worrying too. But I think there lots of applications that CS can do now vs years ago.</p>
<p>The CS crash will come when we can automate a lot of the programming that’s now the job of code monkeys with bachelor’s CS degrees…</p>
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<p>I’ve been hearing that since the 80’s and used to believe it. I don’t anymore. </p>
<p>Not saying it’s anytime soon, but it’ll happen eventually. Probably around the same time that robots are able to do most of the other jobs, and we face a collective existential crisis about the necessity of work and what it means to be human.</p>
<p>BA, we ship robots to Mars that’s built by NASA. Either that we go to Mars when robots take over the earth.</p>