[techtalk] This talk of N-ary trees and other things...

Mary Gardiner mary at puzzling.org
Sun Mar 25 10:27:38 EST 2001


On Sat, Mar 24, 2001 at 04:01:14PM -0800, Nancy Corbett wrote:
> YES!!!  We talk about that a lot where I work.  My company is crawling
> with people who have advanced math degrees.  I affectionatly call 'em
> "Those Math People."  They took to computer languages so easily.  I, on
> the other hand, am degreed in Comparative Literature (yes, I know how to
> say, "Would you like fries with that?").  We've had many good discussions
> about my background in grammar and language studies as my backbone vs.
> their math backgrounds when approaching learning new development skills.  
> 
> I really think that "Those Math People" are way ahead of me in many
> respects, but my education has found many uses in this field.

I am going to graduate quadruple-majored (Australian majors by the way,
translate to taking about half the courses in your final year in the
subject you're majoring in, and since I'm doing two degrees it isn't
actually too much of a leap to do four majors) in pure Maths, CS,
philosophy and linguistics, which is a sort of an ad-hoc mixture of all
these things...

These interests meet some of the J. Random Hacker stuff in the Jargon
file incidently.

Now I have a question, and I'm cross-posting to grrltalk, hoping to move
the thread I might be starting there, since this is very non-technical.

My current five-year plan is something like this:
2002: complete B Sc/BA
2003: Honours in pure maths (or CS, but probably not)
2004 -: Postgraduate work

A couple of questions, is honours in maths going to be acceptable for
postgrad work at the edge of CS/maths (and there are a lot of edges) in
a CS department?

And is there much non-academic work for programmers/designers* in this
sort of area? (Yes I realise I'll have to be good :) )

Should I do postgrad in Australia or not? I'm kind of scared by the
quality of my undergraduate education and the lack of funding for it.

Mary.

* I think of project design in research as where I eventually want to
be, but I think of this as a role you kind of prove yourself into, via
years as a programmer in these kind of projects.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>
GPG Key ID: 77625870




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