I will be attending UA next fall(about 95% sure) and I am planning on majoring in Computer Science. I wanted to hear from past or current students about their experiences in the College of Engineering in this major. Here are a few questions I have:
How well prepared do you feel for the real world?
How was the quality of courses/professors?
Any professors to try to aim for or to avoid?
How was the course workload, is it manageable?
Is there a lot that you are expected to know right off the bat?
Any tips or words of advice for a soon to be freshman?
What courses would you call the “weed-out” courses? How can I best succeed in these courses?
On average, how many hours per semester will I need to take to graduate on time in 4 years?
Would you recommend taking any courses over the summer anytime during my college career at Bama?
I’ll provide a bit of information about me for those curious. I’ll be attending UA, out-of-state, with the help of the UA Scholar scholarship and the supplemental College of Engineering scholarship. That means 100% of my tuition will be covered plus an additional $2,500 a year (remaining costs will be covered by parents, aka no loans or debt). If I were to change my major or have a < 3.0 GPA I would lose some or all of my scholarships. So I really want to make sure I suceed as to not ruin my college career. I will also be a part of the Honors College. When it comes to programming knowledge, I have taken a few Computer Science classes in HS so I know the basics but not much.
Thank you for the help, I really appreciate it. Roll tide!
Welcome! My son is a CS major also with same scholarships from OOS. He was accepted into other universities with higher ranked CS programs but we were very impressed with the engineering facilities and opportunities at UA. He started with a lot of AP credit allowing him to focus on the classes he’s interested in. UA is very generous with their AP credit so he began as a sophomore technically before ever taking a class. He felt the course work was manageable especially since it’s subject matter he’s really interested in learning. However, even if you came to UA with no AP credit you could graduate in four years averaging 15 credits per semester, 120 credits total. At any university there will be the favorite professors and those who many have difficulty with but you will have to learn their teaching style. Many upper level courses are only offered with one professor. The first course is CS 100 which is a basic level programming class that doesn’t have any prereqs. This is where you will learn if programming is the right area of study or not!
Here is the flowchart for CS majors: http://cs.ua.edu/files/2011/08/CS-Flowchart-2015.pdf
Also, the engineering advisors have been reassigned starting this semester by major and not by last name among all the engr majors. I think this will help a lot with streamlining the advising process and help students receive better guidance.
Good luck and Roll Tide!
This forum may not go back far enough to provide many answers for graduated students. Few grads still post, and few parents of grads still post. However, there are some, so hopefully some answers will come.
Weed-out courses tend to be first year courses, and are often Calc I and II and likely that 100 level CS course. Those courses tend to separate the men from the boys.
Weed-out courses are designed to get weaker STEM students to move on before they’ve wasted time and money on courses and a major that doesn’t play to their talents.
@mom2collegekids I’ll actually have dual credit hours for Calc I and II as well as an AP credit for CS 100. I’ll be able to use all those right? Essentially skipping these classes while still getting credit for them?
Yes, you can use the Calc I and Calc II credits if you feel that you have a strong foundation. I think you may be able to use the AP credits for CS 100…you’ll have to check to see if you can use AP credits for a req’d class in your major.
FWIW, I suggest not AP’ing out of CS100. CS100 teaches C, not JAVA, so if you don’t already program in C, you’re going to have trouble in the CS classes even if you AP out of it. (My Freshman daughter had a good AP CS class, but took CS100, and it definitely had a good bit of new material, and also a lot of learning needed to figure out how the various aspects of the classes/labs/projects worked.) So, anyway, although they let you AP out of the first class, I don’t advise it.
Skipping the Calc classes is great though. My dd went ahead with 3rd semester calc (not required for CS, but is required for Comp. Engineering, which she is double majoring in), and it went very smoothly despite it being over a year since she’d had Calc (she took it as a Junior in high school).
I can’t answer your other questions, but welcome to the UA family. My daughter has been very happy there her first semester!
I think this is the last year that if you get the UA Scholars Scholarship and are going into engineering, the engineering department pick ups the last 1/3 of the cost, making it full tuition. You also get a $2500 per year engineering scholarship on top of that. This is great but IF you decide to leave CS/engineering, than you do lose the 1/3 scholarship.
