Ivy Rigor

[Canuckguy]

<p>

You are too systematic to be mere mortal.

</p>

<p>Actually it is the other way around. I am too mortal; therefore I have to be systematic. See above.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>Here’s an interesting article about Latin honors “deflation” at Yale compared to Harvard and Princeton: [Honors</a> cutoffs rose for 2012 grads | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/sep/07/honors-cutoffs-rose-for-2012-grads/]Honors”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/sep/07/honors-cutoffs-rose-for-2012-grads/)</p>

[chaosakita]

<p>

For the hardcore engineering/CS folks who wanted tippy top engineering/CS or top Ivy engineering/CS programs and interactions with strong humanities/SS folks, they seemed to gravitate to schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, UMich, or Columbia. </p>

<p>Moreover, the ranking I mentioned above wasn’t just from HS classmates which could easily be dismissed, but by nearly every senior/supervisory engineer/programmer in hardcore engineering/CS tech firm I’ve worked I’ve visited or worked with. </p>

<p>General consensus was that in the engineering/CS world, there are many Ivies and private/state* schools which are rated higher in their own pecking order of which schools to give hiring preferences.

</p>

<p>Who cares where you go for engineering school? What separates the quality of engineering programs? I don’t think it would be that much worse going to Harvard over Berkeley if they cost about the same. And you wouldn’t have to deal with Berkeley’s financial situation. Not sure how the engineering school is specifically, but I think not being shuttered out of crucial classes is pretty important to me.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>Cobrat, I didn’t feel it odd at all that my son chose Carnegie Mellon over Harvard once I got to know Carnegie Mellon better. (You have to remember I attended Harvard in the era when Bill Gates was there, it was not considered a backwater then - though obviously MIT on the East Coast was better known - I knew quite a few comp sci majors including both my brothers.) I made my son apply to Harvard, not because I thought it was the best choice for comp sci, but because of schools of that caliber it was the one he had the best chance of being accepted at. (Naviance suggested perhaps as high as 50/50.) No one from our school gets into Stanford without being a legacy and/or athlete. Berkeley has impacted majors and no guaranteed housing for sophomores. Columbia is too close. If he was the sort of kid who would have taken advantage of Harvard, I might have lobbied for it a bit, but he was not, and we supported his decision 100%.</p>

<p>Harvard may not have a tippy top comp sci program, but its graduates are hired by the usual suspects in the field. (And just like there are more than 10 top colleges, there are more than 10 good comp sci firms to work for.) :)</p>

<p>And Harvard’s financial aid would have made it cheaper than CMU for sure.</p>

[Gourmetmom]

<p>Cobrat’s notion that engineering graduates from lesser ranked schools are sneered at in some circles is fairly ridiculous. And like Pizzagirl always mentions (paraphrasing here), “Who cares what foolish people think anyway?” </p>

<p>My husband (headed engineering for a mid-sized tech company) hired scores of engineers with a variety of backgrounds. He was never particularly concerned where they attended college, but rather, what they brought to the job. And I recall that in many cases, the best recruits did not necessarily attend “top” programs - the best computer engineer he ever hired (truly brilliant) - in nearly 30 years - attended URI.</p>

<p>My son will major in engineering at Harvard, and he’s not crying alligator tears that it’s not highly ranked in some circles. He had a choice of “better” programs, including Caltech, but he wants to take advantage of everything Harvard has to offer. He’s such a good student that the academic portion of any program, anywhere, will not make much difference to him, and he’d like other experiences/opportunities. Besides, according to my H, engineers learn most of what they need to know during the first year on the job.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@lake42ks

If such a student chooses not to go a tech school, will that hurt him/her in the long run? some CC posters convinced me it won’t and I certainly hope not.

</p>

<p>Depends on what school the “hardcore engineering/CS” student actually does go to. Going to a school that is not a “tech school” but has strong engineering/CS is a lot different from going to a school where engineering/CS is relatively weak or even non-existent.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@chaosakita

And you wouldn’t have to deal with Berkeley’s financial situation. Not sure how the engineering school is specifically, but I think not being shuttered out of crucial classes is pretty important to me.

</p>

<p>If Berkeley students were unable to get critical classes, then Berkeley would not have one of the highest four year graduation rates among public universities.</p>

<p>The financial situation’s main effect is to cause UC in-state tuition to rise rapidly.</p>

[cobrat]

<p>

If such a student chooses not to go a tech school, will that hurt him/her in the long run? some CC posters convinced me it won’t and I certainly hope not.

</p>

<p>One does not necessarily have to attend a tech-only or schools with lopsided strengths heavily weighed towards tech as shown here:</p>

<p>

For the hardcore engineering/CS folks who wanted tippy top engineering/CS or top Ivy engineering/CS programs and interactions with strong humanities/SS folks, they seemed to gravitate to schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, UMich, or Columbia.

</p>

<p>All the schools listed above have topflight engineering programs alongside topflight humanities/social science programs for the most part.</p>

[lookingforward]

<p>The link to the racism thread - did you mean 628? (That’s a post by Canuckguy.)
Some of my “angled” view of what is info versus assumption does come from one of the racism threads. There’s a whole lotta venting and certainty, an occasional reference to some study (back then, most often, Duke. And Esplanade, who, as I noted, admits his findings are limited.) And, it all leads to one conclusion: anti-Asian policies and a reckless search for URMs, Does that make it real? </p>

<p>The argument that a definition of “merit” floats applies to so many situations- and to us as individuals, too. Btw, fwiw, the link to the NYT blog by Fitzsimmons was informative- I hope a few looked at it.</p>

[texaspg]

<p>Computer science has two sides to it, hardware and software. Most liberal arts oriented colleges have adopted CS on the software end since the beginning and Harvard is no different. CS software is pretty much languages and math.</p>

<p>I would assume they might be weak in hardware but right up there with any college on software.</p>

[bovertine]

<p>Oh no TPG. This thread has already traveled the meandering path through racism, personality classification and Jean Arthur. Now you may have steered it onto the “what is computer science” offramp.:)</p>

[bovertine]

<p>Oh, and don’t forget that brief excursion to Ancient Rome.</p>

[cobrat]

<p>

@mathmom

(You have to remember I attended Harvard in the era when Bill Gates was there, it was not considered a backwater then

</p>

<p>To most hardcore CS folks I’ve known/worked with, Bill Gates isn’t regarded as a technological innovator. In fact, making such a statement would cause many to ROTFLOL ruefully considering Microsoft’s long history of buying<em>, copying</em>*, and legally strong arming smaller companies into giving them their IP property to develop or quash to reduce competition. </p>

<p>His contribution to the tech world was in the concept of software licensing which is more sales/business area than tech. </p>

<p>A contribution that’s considered by those hardcore CS folks dismissively as “non-tech” at best…and controversially as facilitating "selling out to pointy-haired MBA business types at worst. Granted, those holding the latter type views tend to be over the top at times. </p>

<ul>
<li>Microsoft bought the rights to DOS from a programmer in 1981.<br></li>
</ul>

<p>** Copying the Windows interface from Xerox Parc project and Mac OS</p>

[DonnaL]

<p>

Here’s an interesting article about Latin honors “deflation” at Yale compared to Harvard and Princeton: Honors cutoffs rose for 2012 grads | Yale Daily News

</p>

<p>That is interesting. Those cutoffs are higher than when I graduated in the mid-1970’s: I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I do remember (because I was halfway in between) that you needed about a 3.8 GPA for magna cum laude, and about 3.9 for summa cum laude. It also seems that magna cum laude is now more restrictive in terms of the percentage of the class that receives it: it’s now limited to 10%, and I’m sure it was more than that when I was there, because 10% was the limit for Phi Beta Kappa, and I knew people who graduated magna cum laude but didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa.</p>

[texaspg]

<p>Bovertine - are you waiting for the thread to die? You did not take the engineering rigor bait! You also left out native latin speakers.</p>

<p>Bill Gates has a legacy to boast of irrespective of what “Foolish people say” (for the life of me, i would have never imagined i would be quoting Pizzagirl). Same goes for Zuckerberg. Harvard did not make them but Harvard gave them the background for business, connections, etc. </p>

<p>There are lot of people producing great softwares out there that die in their garage or personal computers. It is how to get much further with the product is what matters in the end. </p>

<p>MAC got the same Xerox Parc interface while xerox got zilch. IBM paid for DOS but did not ask for copyright. Whose fault is that? Samething goes for those twins who wanted Zuckerberg to do something and sued him later. They would have gotten much further if they just gave him an invite to join their finals club rather than treat him like an outcast and hired help in their dealings with him.</p>

<p>This is one of the most interesting online classes I have come across.</p>

<p><a href=“http://cs50.tv/2011/fall/[/url]”>http://cs50.tv/2011/fall/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[Canuckguy]

<p>

The link to the racism thread - did you mean 628? (That’s a post by Canuckguy.)

</p>

<p>Yes, just post 628. Sorry for the confusion. I was simply too lazy to write about Euan Blair again.</p>

<p>The irony is that PG and I do agree that merit is “in motion”. I simply went a step further to explore why it is in motion, who puts it in motion, and who benefits from its motion.</p>

<p>As an aside, anyone watched Olympic badminton? I forgot I made a prediction in post 628 and was right on target. Don’t know how the Indonesian officials justify their epic “failure” to their countrymen, but I am certain they will invoke the concept of “merit in motion” in one form or another.</p>

<p>Hi, bovertine. Glad to see you having such a great time. Any more luck with the equation by the man “who killed Wall Street”?</p>

[cobrat]

<p>

Bill Gates has a legacy to boast of irrespective of what “Foolish people say” (for the life of me, i would have never imagined i would be quoting Pizzagirl). Same goes for Zuckerberg. Harvard did not make them but Harvard gave them the background for business, connections, etc.

</p>

<p>I never said he didn’t have a legacy to boast. Just that his real legacy is more in the marketing/sales/business sector…not an area which gives one serious tech cred among the hardcore CS folks I’ve met/worked with. </p>

<p>The one time I jokingly compared UNIX X-Windows with Microsoft Windows* while visiting an older cousin’s engineering/tech firm, he and his co-workers retorted that like comparing great bands like the Clash or Green Day with cringeworthy crappy ones like Vanilla Ice, NKOTB, or the Bee Gees. </p>

<ul>
<li>Win 95 was still relatively new and NT was still on version 3.51.</li>
</ul>

[bovertine]

<p>Yes CG - I’ve pretty much forgotten what that equation was (something to do with probabilities in the derivatives market?)
Anyway, I consider my decision to not waste time with it to be great progress.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>Hey, was Bill Gates a great programmer? Probably not. But I know a lot of comp sci majors who were Microsoft millionaires in their 30s. My friends went off to then respected companies like Alta Vista and DEC as well as Microsoft. Many of them now are in charge of their own small firms. My older brother got more interested in the psychology of teaching programmers to talk to their clients and actually give them what they need. I think that’s pretty much what Harvard is all about. My other brother works with the World Health Organization and a boatload of publishers organizing their online stuff. Again a position where a not just technical education might be useful. </p>

<p>Microsoft’s legacy may be in marketing, but it still needs the programmers to make it work.</p>

[Wildwood11]

<p>

Here’s an interesting article about Latin honors “deflation” at Yale compared to Harvard and Princeton: Honors cutoffs rose for 2012 grads | Yale Daily News

</p>

<p>The higher cutoffs is an indication of grade inflation, as the percentage of graduates receiving each level of honor remains the same.</p>

<p>

It also seems that magna cum laude is now more restrictive in terms of the percentage of the class that receives it: it’s now limited to 10%, and I’m sure it was more than that when I was there, because 10% was the limit for Phi Beta Kappa, and I knew people who graduated magna cum laude but didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa.

</p>

<p>Isn’t the criteria for Phi Beta Kappa different from straight gpa? Different schools do it differently but it can involve non-academic criteria as long as it is limited to 10% of the class.</p>