I’ve applied at three schools: UW for software engineering, Mac for Engineering I, and U of T for computer engineering. At the moment, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to end up at Waterloo one way or another. Mac is a nice second choice, and U of T remains a distant third for completely stupid forms. Anyway, during one of my anticipating next year thought sessions. The more I think about it, the more uncertain I am about whether or not I chose the right program.
My choice to apply for software engineering was largely propelled by the fact that it had a high entrance average and that it was part of both Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering and its Faculty of Mathematics. Also, I’d get to call myself an engineer and can say that I applied to engineering, rather than computer science.
It wasn’t until the past few months that I began to realize what kind of restrictions I could potentially put myself in. The way engineering is set up isn’t very flexible. There’s not as much room for electives and all that. The other thing was that engineering requires that I take at least some science. The past few months have begun to make science an enemy of mine so I’m not exactly thrilled at the prospect of having to go through first year physics or chem.
But I think the freedom is the thing I’d miss the most. I was planning on taking a Cognitive Science option if I got into SE. Personally, I find cogsci quite interesting, what with the mix of CS, psych, and philosophy. The problem with that is that if I take that, then there doesn’t seem to be any space left for anything else.
Math seems looks like a lot more fun. There’s more math and less science, and lately, my interest in math has gone up, even though my marks in math have gone down. I guess it’s all the theory in math rather than the bloody labs that we do in science. I’m totally awesome with theory but really suck at practice. The thing I can’t do in science is labs. I can totally fly with pretty much anything they throw at me
I guess if I really, really wanted to get put in CS, I could change my AIF so that I have no programming experience whatsoever.
hey Tim~
for other universities I heard that first year sciences — chem/phys are usually just review of what you do in grade 12 — with a bit of new stuff to make the course a tad bit more interesting — and really if you get the core of what you know now it should be fine.
on the side of Cognitive Science.. wells it is truly a beautiful program :) I think you’ll love it — on the side of Philosophy since afterall… thats what everything eventually boils down to… philosophy :P
Psych — dunno if you’ll like that, but for cogsci most of the psych courses are geared towards memory, thought, language –
linguistics — you’ll find interesting i think, a lot of theoretic stuff, its literally ‘word math’ some ppl love it, some people — a few of my friends in the sciences/kin hate it :P
so i dunno :P
fun stuff fun stuff — seek Him, and everything will come clear :)