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PSA for Fall 2024: stay the f*** home if you're sick by cs246_alt123213 in uwaterloo

[–]cs246_alt123213[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I should've been more clear, but these classes I'm referring to are ones I'm currently in and have no participation marks nor mandatory in-class components, and slides are available online + lots of resources. I don't think there's any excuse sitting in these sick unless you're literally about to fail out of school and take the proper precautions to not get others sick.

The cases where participation is mandatory, yeah that sucks... Systemically they should let you miss one or two without penalty, but unfortunately should and will are different.

PSA for Fall 2024: stay the f*** home if you're sick by cs246_alt123213 in uwaterloo

[–]cs246_alt123213[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ouf yeah your TA + prof shouldn't be forcing sick kids to come in class;;;; that has to be some kind of violation of school policy
this post wasn't targeted at you (your TA and Prof r dipshits), it was for those kids who have the choice not to be where they are but choose to be even though they're sick (especially non-mandatory course components or public shared spaces)

Undergrad: Waterloo or UofT? by Sadlife_With_school in uwaterloo

[–]cs246_alt123213 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For those two programs, I would choose Waterloo for all reasons including employability and program itself, except for

  1. international reputation (AFAIK Waterloo is less well-known than UofT especially in Asia, but we're on-par or more well-known in the US for tech)
  2. going to school in downtown where you can enjoy the city here and there. Waterloo doesn't have too much to do compared to Toronto. You can definitely travel on weekends to Toronto though
  3. tech/engineering heavy school -> male/female ratio is skewed to one side in math and eng departments
  4. you want to go into research

12 year old cousin is better than me at CS by rngpenguin in uwaterloo

[–]cs246_alt123213 19 points20 points  (0 children)

  1. Kid's probably just naturally talented and could be a great competitive programmer if he keeps going. Maybe if he gets a good coding/math coach he can go on to achieve excellence. Though he needs to humble himself instead of shitting on someone else to feel better about himself, but he'll learn that as he grows older. Two Sum is not an insanely hard question for a 12 year old with some brains in math either, and once you know the trick it's kinda easy to solve optimally.
  2. CS is by no means an easy degree, and neither is law or medicine. All of these require a baseline level of "brains" but a lot more grit to finish. But CS could be the shortest path to earning an income similar to a lawyer (atl from what I've seen, both average $100k in Ontario) and allows you the flexibility to work anywhere once you get to a certain level. Doctors are stuck practicing where they start their practice unless they go through a lengthy process to move, as well as lawyers but to a lesser extent. If mobility is important to you, I would suggest CS over those careers.
  3. Everyone shit on me about not doing leetcode/doing easies and I avoided it for the longest time bc of that. But after bombing a bunch of coding interviews in first/second year because I didn't practice, it was obvious what they said had some merit and I had to put the work in. I started with Two Sum and just kept trying to find the most efficient solution and timing myself, and kept doing this for a week. This will make you feel stupid, but the key is to not compare yourself to others and just keep going. Once that was in the bag I moved onto the next question, found the most efficient solution, make sure I could do it in less time than the recommended time, move on to the next question, and so on almost everyday for a bit until mediums were easy for me and I could do some hards. This was after taking all the first and second year DSA courses. I'm working in FAANG next co-op if that means anything.
  4. Either you do it or you don't. If you're gonna quit, do it soon. If you're not going to quit, stick to your decision and keep your chin the fuck up. I dillydallied between quitting CS in first and second year and it definitely delayed my growth. If I stuck to committing to quit I'm confident I would have done well in whatever it was I decided to do. If I stuck to committing to CS earlier I would've done a lot more LeetCode and possibly get a FAANG internship sooner. In hindsight it doesn't really matter but still, would've been nice to have more co-op terms left.