<p>I’m a graduating EE that had job offers for software positions at both Intel and Qualcomm. I really like the combination of EE with some software courses on the side…I was able to get two software internships as a EE with software experience, and I had multiple full-time software job offers. A lot of the organizations that I talked to really liked to see a EE with solid CS skills - it was a good way to differentiate myself from the myriad of CS students vying for similar jobs.</p>
<p>If you want to do web development or some similarly high-level CS, then a EE background may not suit you…but for embedded systems, machine learning, image processing, robotics, or any of the number of interdisciplinary fields within CS, a EE background is very beneficial IMO.</p>
<p>What Gobeavs said. Soldering-Iron-and-wirewrap EE’s are a thing of the past, EE’s who can write code and can read, interpret, and work with schematics is where the money is…Needless to say we do serious embedded systems.</p>
<p>What is your source of info for that? I think that most people who actually graduate with CS degrees had done some programming in high school. It isn’t required to start a CS program to have programming experience, I suppose, but I would guess that the drop out rate from the major is way higher among those without it.</p>
<p>Especially note this sentence: “on average, they know at least one programming
language in depth.” Later on in the article there is a table showing that in 2008 only 18% of the CS students at this particular University had no programming experience.</p>
<p>The problem is the time restraint. Perhaps I will begin to learn programming in the second semester of my senior year where the College decisions will come in.</p>
<p>I don’t see the point of a CS minor with a EE or CE major. Just take some CS classes, which you will probably be required to do anyway. </p>
<p>I think it is fairly rare for engineers to have minors. (Back in the dark ages when I went to engineering school at a state flagship U, I can’t recall a single one of my classmates having a minor.) Engineering majors require a lot more classes and have much less flexibility than most majors in Colleges of Arts & Sciences. I don’t think having a mnior would add much to a job search, unless it was in a very different area, like English or Psychology or Art or Music, and one was looking for a job that combined technology with that area.</p>
<p>Can anyone recommend me a starting point to learn programming. I have no experience what so ever, I have never written a code or anything. I tried looking through Youtube and several websites, but they instantly start off demonstrating codes without telling me anything about why they use those characters. I really want to build a foundation. Is MIT 6.00 CS Lecture any good for beginners?</p>
<p>Use any of the intro to CS courses on OpenCourseware…</p>
<p>Colleges know that not all students come to college with CS knowledge. Some high schools have little or no technology courses in their curriculum and other students decide fairly late that they want to study CS or CE. That is why there are INTRO courses. Many schools have two versions of the intro courses to accommodate the different backgrounds of the freshmen students. Don’t worry.</p>
<p>Of course. As BeanTownGirl said, all CS departments offer Intro classes, and there is not a requirement that CS majors have programming experience.</p>
<p>In my experience, programming comes naturally to some people, and not to others. (Just like other things, like art and music, are more natural to some than others.) Someone who has never programmed before but begins a CS major might end up finding that they don’t like programming and it doesn’t come naturally to them, and end up switching to a different major. Those who already have programming experience have probably already figured out if it comes naturally to them or not. </p>
<p>CS also involves much more than programming.</p>
<p>This is my biggest problem, if I do start learning programming, at what point will I know, “hmm This is for me” before I prematurely give it up.</p>
<ol>
<li> Go to codepad.org, select C++</li>
<li> Enter the following:</li>
</ol>
<h1>include <iostream></iostream></h1>
<p>using namespace std;</p>
<p>int main(void)
{
int i, foo=10;</p>
<p>for(i=0;i<foo;i++)
{
cout<<i<<endl;
}</p>
<p>return 0;
}</p>
<ol>
<li> Hit submit, look at the output.</li>
<li> Try making changes, replace cout<<i<<endl; with=“” cout<<i*i<<endl;=“” to=“” see=“” what=“” happens,=“” or=“” replacing=“” it=“” cout<<i=“” foo<<endl;=“” happens.=“” try=“” changing=“” the=“” start=“” values=“” of=“” foo=“” and=“” i=“” make=“” bigger=“” than=“” change=“” i<foo=“”>foo and i++ to i-- and see what happens.</i<<endl;></li>
<li> Did you absolutely hate everything I just asked you to do? Did it not interest you in the slightest? If the answer is yes, then CS probably isn’t for you and you will know in the ten minutes it takes.</li>
</ol>
<p>hmm, its difficult to tell if I am having the response I am having because I “want” to like it, or if I truly do like it. I will say this, I did try to figure out what was going on in the code and the functions inside it. I did have a moment of thinking about how I can apply something like this to some formulas in my chemistry class. Again, Im not sure if I like it, or I want to like it. I had trouble understanding what the code meant.</p>
<p>Well, being confused by something can affect your enjoyment, but being confused is okay. I think somebody who would have an interest in CS would be intrigued by seeing the guts of a simple program, poking around and making changes to see what happens, and guessing what things do what.</p>
<h1>include <iostream> includes the necessary pre-written code to print things to the screen</iostream></h1>
<p>cout<<i<<endl; prints the value of i to the screen, followed by a newline character (IOW it prints the value of i on a line by itself).</p>
<p>for(i=0;i<foo;i++)
{
instruction
}
means i starts at zero, and “instruction” is executed repeatedly for as long as i is less than the value of foo, and after each iteration of the loop the value of i is increased by one. To strip it free of language and syntax, the program essentially says:</p>
<p>for i=1 to 10 do
print i;
i=i+1;</p>
<p>That, in a nutshell, is what the program is. The other stuff is C+±specific syntax and overhead. A simple program to print the characters of a matrix would be</p>
<p>for i=0 to x_resolution do
for j=0 to y resolution do
print element (i,j)
go to new line</p>
<p>Nested loops, aha! Now, how this is actually implemented (like, how the values of the matrix are stored in memory) can vary, but algorithms are pretty language-independent.</p>
<p>Haha. I know you are trying to make me understand, but I just can’t comprehend simply because I just never touched a code. However, I don’t think not understanding it is enough for me to say good bye to it, its simply a problem of exposure.</p>