Anyone’s kid major in CS without any previous experience?

[Anonymous]

OP,

At GMU, they have a course schedule diagram that includes options for kids who haven't had calculus yet, or other specific classes. The impression I had is that they wanted to make CS an option for kids who come from various backgrounds.

I think a PP was right that taking a community college class in coding or computer science would be a good idea to see if it is worth pursuing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you don't have any experience, you will need to take an intro programming class and discrete math class. If you are doing fine, you have to take a required 200 level 'Data Structure and Algorithm' class next. This is the key weed-out class for a CS major. If you do reasonably well in that class, you probably have what it takes to move on declaring CS major. There are still more difficult classes in 300 and 400 levels.

It's not easy. It's not for everyone. Not many girls end up in CS majors. It's mostly boys.

Fingers crossed for our DS who had minimal programming experience in HS and is now in his second year of CS in college and perhaps taking the class this PP mentions. He got interested after taking the CS principles class and a basic robotics class in HS, and then decided to start learning Python summer before college began. Hopefully he makes it through because I'm not sure what would be transferable to another major at this point. Last year he said other kids came to him for help and helping them really helped him think of various ways to solve the problems since he couldn't share his own programming answer - I know nothing about programming so not sure this is something in CS or not. He's now in Java classes I think.

Our DS is the kind of kid who probably won't code for long after college but will likely be picked for sales/marketing and perhaps eventually leadership roles where ever he lands. I do think it's possible to start late for analytical/math types or just plain super smart kids. DS has ADD but also has an extremely high verbal IQ and is a very outside the box creative thinker which seems to help him. If there's a will there's usually a way for most students at the college level.

[Anonymous]

There is something like a 40% drop out rate from Comp Sci majors--not really drop out, I guess, more of "change to another major." My guess is the majority of those students are ones with no experience coming in. I think that's totally fine, of course, but it is what it is.