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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He's not wrong! Excellent college essay topic, btw

Coding and CS aren't the same thing though. College isn't, in fact, going to teach him much about python that he doesn't already know. But there's a lot of math, theory, etc. And it will let him discover if he wants to, for example, go to grad school.

I recommend asking him to read this book (free online): https://sicpebook.wordpress.com/ebook/

And go to MIT OpenCourseWare and explore some video lectures, problem set, etc
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-004-computation-structures-spring-2017/
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-046j-design-and-analysis-of-algorithms-spring-2015/

He'll either get excited about college, or at least his disinterest in college will be better informed![/quote]

I am the quoted poster’s husband and I agree with what she said here but wanted to add my own perspective. This is an anonymous board so make of my post what you will. I’m not making things up, and I’m not bragging (there’s no point because it’s anonymous).

First, I do want to engage in a bit of credentialism. Again, anonymous forum so you should in fact be skeptical but I am not going to lie. I am finishing up a Ph.D. in CS from a high ranked CS research school. I taught the introduction to programming class there several times. I also started university at 13 at a state school where I grew up (driving distance from my house) before going to graduate school. I am technically a middle school dropout. I don’t have a GED or anything.

I whole heartedly agree with my wife that CS is more than just the coding. Learning CS theory, systems, etc. will make you a better programmer. It’s one of the things that separates a good CS major from someone who went to a coding boot camp and is one of the reasons I do still think we should have CS degrees.

College isn’t (entirely) about learning new skills. From my perspective, there are four main reasons to go to University in a case like this.

1) Credentials. Getting a degree from a major university will help you get a job and help people who you do not yet know take you more seriously. It really sucks that this is the case but it is a fact. 
2) Networking. Particularly somewhere like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, or CMU. The alumni network and name recognition can be quite helpful in career advancement, not just securing an initial job. Note: this still applies even if you only go to graduate school there. 
3) Research. Going to a research university gives you the opportunity to find faculty to work on research with. This is fun and gives the opportunity to publish papers and is necessary for graduate school if that’s something your son ends up finding interesting in the long run. 
4) Facilities. Hardware is fun to work with. That’s hard to do at home. Plenty of universities have maker spaces and the like where you can do fun things with hardware. It’s an underrated skill.

My advice: follow my wife’s suggestion. If he shows any interest in going to college after that (and frankly even if he doesn’t), try to get him interested in taking University classes, ideally enrolled as a student so he can get credit. He should understand that he is likely to be bored out of his mind in the early CS classes and the general education requirements. It sucks. It will feel like a waste of time and money. It’s no more of a waste of time than a similar class in high school. Less wasteful as it is leading towards a degree. But at a University, he can find a professor/lab to do interesting side projects with.

Your son sounds quite autodidactic and could probably learn many of these skills through things like OCW but getting a piece of paper that certifies you in that is worth the time, even if it feels stupid (it does feel stupid). I also want to state for the record that I agree with your son that the way programming classes are taught is often stupid and counter productive.

Last point related to the actual topic of the thread: contributing to open source projects *is* an extracurricular activity. I don’t know if admissions officers at the Ivies agree with me here and I know that MIT’s admissions are looking more like the ivies these days. Caltech’s admissions process hasn’t changed in my understanding and they take people with highly specific technical interest.

For one last point related to things that came up in this thread: people are correct that AI is likely to wipe out a lot of coding jobs in the near future. A lot of programming work for the lower end of the programming skill bell curve ends up being writing very formulaic, repeated code that is easy to replicate with AI. That said, there are a lot of problems with blindly trusting code generated by an AI and bugs are always going to be a thing and hiring a human programmer to fix them and find them is going to be a requirement for real, functional software for a long time. There are a surprising number of people with CS degrees who are working as software engineers who can’t code their way out of a paper bag. There will be jobs for competent programmers for a long time, particularly in things that are safety critical but even things that are not.

But all this is just, like, my opinion man. 
[img]https://y.yarn.co/9212bb82-3c0d-4fa3-ae8a-a78ca74a9fe3_text.gif[/img]

P.S. My wife wants me to add that one of the benefits of going to college is making friends and having a social life with other nerds. This is fair. We met via a student group when I was working on my Master’s and we are both incredibly nerdy. [/quote]
I guess DCUM doesn't have a word limit. [/quote]

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