<p>I'm going to be a freshman this fall, looking to major in chemE, but i've had no prior programming experience. Am I screwed?</p>
<p>Uh, no. The school may recommend that you have prior programming experience before taking the intro to programming class, but with some effort, you will do fine. I had no programming experience (except for some Basic on a TRS-80 back in the day) and I aced the class.</p>
<p>thanks dude, that brought me up a little :)</p>
<p>90% of Computer science major students have no programming experiences prior to intro course.</p>
<p>exactly as illegalSmile.</p>
<p>Are you sure about that, jwxie?</p>
<p>Hahahaha.
Well 
I just made that up. 90% is way too off. But I am confident to say at least 50-60%
Many that I have met said they picked CS because they liked computers</p>
<p>:) and also, other than computer science and engineering, and financial engineering, students from other engineering disciplines that do not rely on computer science, GENERALLY had never taken any programming class.</p>
<p>A good survey would be Harvard’s CS 50
72% had no knowledge of any programming practice</p>
<p>nice statistic …i would say that the number seems about right from what i’ve seen</p>
<p>And of those 72% how many make it through to the end, and of those 72% who made it through, what were their grade ranges? The logic is incomplete.</p>
<p>Introductory programming is trivial. I went into ECE with zero programming experience (didn’t even know the basic loops) and did fine.</p>
<p>The statistic is incomplete of course, and I am not a Harvard student.
As I always tell people on CC, courses are taught by human beings. Some will eventually appear on your hater list while some won’t. It might be misleading to believe introductory course in computer science is easy, or any introductory course in college is supposes to be easy. </p>
<p>lol</p>
<p>As illegalSmile suggested, if you work hard enough, very often your effort pay for it.
If you are another victim of a super nova type professor, nobody can really save you from that.</p>
<p>:) I know in our C++ introductory course, the professor I took was very easy (and I do have a solid programming experience prior taking this course), and the other professor who taught Python made the class so hard that even I think it was way too off. :)</p>
<p>The important thing is to make sure you thoroughly understand your class. The professors know that a lot of kids may not know what the hell is even going on, so seek help if you need it, it’s nothing to be shy about since lots of people have problems with it. </p>
<p>If you find that some time down the road you didn’t learn it properly, you may get very irritated when you have to learn a lot of things over again. So personally, I’d try very hard the first time around. That being said, it’s still an intro course and it shouldn’t take a gargantuan effort to do well. It’s one of those things that needs to ‘click’.</p>
<p>I am in the same situation, going into the same major. I tried to learn a little bit of c++ last week, but I couldn’t get hello world to work. I’m just going to learn programming in the intro class. </p>
<p>We can place out of that class if we show proficient programming knowledge (pass their test). This makes me think that the class is designed with the most beginner in mind, and everyone else who knows their stuff will skip it. I’ll definitely be taking it.</p>
<p>In my son’s schools, based on course enrollments, I’d say that around 30% actually finish with the CS degree. There’s programming, physics and calculus in the first year and those weed out many students. Then there’s circuits, the higher-level math courses and the theory courses that some don’t make it through.</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with learning programming over the summer.</p>
<p>[MIT</a> OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008 | Home](<a href=“http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/]MIT”>Introduction to Computer Science and Programming | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare)</p>
<p>When I went to Purdue for Computer Science. They told us in the first day of class, for encouragement, that Purdue’s CS department had a 20% graduation rate. When they stated this they almost did it with a bit of pride. Sure they are making a challenging degree but from my experience they did everything they could to make it impossible. For example, my java class, our first test the professor’s assistant wrote. The professor took and said he completed it in 20 mins. He told us it should only take about 40-60 mins to complete. Well let’s just say 5 out of 100 completed it in the allotted time (2hrs). Our TA said it took him 2.5 hrs to do. They made it difficult, thus they have a 20% graduation rate. </p>
<p>This always made me think some schools overseas who have just as good CS programs can graduate 90% while the US can only graduate 20-30%.</p>
<p>Some of my sons courses (CS, math, science) had tests or labs where you needed knowledge from courses that you took in later years making it impossible to do the problems unless you had read textbooks for future courses or had seen the material from outside of the classroom. This sort of thing makes it pretty hard to get an A unless you love the discipline and just enjoy reading textbooks.</p>
<p>As what everyone has said, I wouldn’t worry about not doing any programming in HS, you should be fine. It wouldn’t hurt to see what kind of programming language your math modeling class uses and just start messing around that. The one at PSU uses MATLAB and kinda sucks cause they just assume you’ve had prior exposure to it (when about 97% of the class hasnt). But still, its nothing to worry about because it isn’t hard to pick up the basics when you need to.</p>
<p>It seems some of you are a bit still confused. I will offer this analogy. MANY students pursue majors outside of the sciences/medicine, yet proceed onto medical school. They are at a disadvantage in regards to those students who majored in biochemistry (by far), but is this wall a halting structure? No, they still pull through and get what needs to be done, done.</p>
<p>Chance favors the prepared mind.</p>
<p>well i say be prepared. I had no idea that there was even computer programming involved in engineering and as a result, stuggled so hard in this class. if you find it difficult, get some friends in the class since there will be alot of people that understand it alot</p>