<p>I hope you came to the direct admit fair yesterday. If you didn't, or are still on the fence, you should post here and I'll do my best (and/or recruit others) to respond to any questions/doubts that you may have.</p>
<p>UW CSE is pretty damn awesome, so you should definitely come here!</p>
<p>Also, someone said hi to me at the direct admit event … except 1) I have no idea who you are and 2) I have no idea how you knew who I was.</p>
<p>I have a suspicion on an explanation for #2 if you’re from the Bellevue area… but yeah. Hi! :D</p>
<p>Hey guys! First off, thanks for doing this. I have two questions that I was wondering about. Does Honors mix well with CS or should I just drop it? Secondly, I was considering double majoring but wasn’t really sure what to do it with yet, so what would be the best time to figure that out by?</p>
<p>Danialllll</p>
<p>First of all, here are the types of Honors for reference: <a href=“http://depts.washington.edu/uwhonors/reqs/[/url]”>http://depts.washington.edu/uwhonors/reqs/</a></p>
<p>A lot of people do Departmental Honors, which mostly involves maintaining a certain GPA and doing research for a year with an accompanying thesis.</p>
<p>Interdisciplinary honors should definitely be doable. speedsolver can maybe comment with more accuracy on the general difficulty of doing this, but I know several people in Honors who seem to be doing okay. There are a couple of downsides here: if you have transfer/Running Start credit, you’ll probably have to retake the Honors versions of those credits instead of having them fulfill Honors Gen Ed requirements. If you have a significant chunk of such credit, it’s kind of a bad deal. The other downside is that you’ll have less flexibility with your schedule. There aren’t as many Honors courses/sections offered (for obvious reasons), and trying to get CS courses to play nicely might be a pain. As a Direct Admit, you’ll probably be okay (you have more years to fit CS classes into), but this is a potential issue. On the bright side, I’ve heard that Honors courses can be pretty intellectually stimulating; there are also some cool profs.</p>
<p>Double majoring - depends on how intense/complementary the major is, whether you’re doing Honors, and how much of what transfer credit you have. The more you do, the earlier it is you should start. There’s a fair amount of overlap with Math (several CS courses can count for math requirements), which makes it one of the easier double majors to do, followed by other science/engineering stuff. Generally people without transfer credit take up to five years to do two majors, although Math could probably be accomplished in four. There are so many factors here that it would probably be easier if you could respond with a little more background.</p>
<p>Hi Speedsolver, I believe that might have been me! Your name popped up when you sent me the appeal letter guide so I recognized your name from there. </p>
<p>I’d like to know whether I should take CSE 142 or CSE 143 next year as I am currently taking APCS, but I do not feel that my teacher is covering the curriculum very well and don’t feel very ready for the AP test.</p>
<p>Here’s an old course website with some sample final exams: <a href=“http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse142/12au/exams.shtml[/url]”>http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse142/12au/exams.shtml</a></p>
<p>If you feel generally comfortable with the material (or you think you can catch up), then take 143. Otherwise, stick with 142.</p>
<p>Are there any specific things I should do when signing up for my A&O session as a direct admit? Also, since I’m going for computer science and biology, should I list my area of interest as “Engineering, Math, and Physical Sciences” or something else? Thanks!</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s anything specific you need to do (and that area of interest sounds fine). CSE advising will be able to help you out a lot better, anyways, although it might be useful to get a new general advisor’s opinion on how to fit in two majors.</p>
<p>You should probably just treat this as a way to get to know people; the outdoor adventures stuff in particular looks like a lot of fun.</p>
<p>You guys have any cool CS projects to share about? I am direct too, couldn’t come to tour day though.</p>
<p>hitachiota: Oh. Hi hi! 
I hope you’ll be joining us next year!</p>
<p>extreeemz: Do you mean projects from courses, on our own time, or stuff we’ve worked on in research/internships?</p>
<p>Just like, stuff on your own time. For instance, I wrote a program that groups tweets by event, not using hashtags.</p>
<p>So, there are these cool color-changing LED lightbulbs made by Philips: <a href=“http://www.meethue.com%5B/url%5D”>http://www.meethue.com</a></p>
<p>At the recent Facebook Seattle hackathon, some friends and I created some software that can control these lightbulbs in interesting ways. If you tweet at (or direct message) the right twitter account, the bot watching that account will respond accordingly. You can say things like “turn the lights on”, “OFF BABY!”, “snap to red”, “fade to dim blue”, “turn [lightbulb name] bright green”, etc. Since we don’t match commands directly and instead scan for various tokens, you can use somewhat natural language as long as some recognized keyword is present. You can also message a youtube link, and the not will download the associated video, extract the audio, and play the music while flashing all of the lightbulbs in time to signals/rhythm retrieved from processing the audio (creating a disco-ish effect).</p>
<p>More features are on the way once we have some free time…</p>
<p>Code is here: <a href=“http://github.com/sumanvyj/phosbot[/url]”>http://github.com/sumanvyj/phosbot</a></p>
<p>Edit: One more thing! If you associate the watched Twitter account with a contact in iOS, you can use Siri to tweet at it.</p>