I have two pieces of advice for you. Please take them with a grain of salt—this is merely my opinion and I am by no means an expert in the matter. Note that I can’t really recommend that you do things one way or another, but I thought I would bring up some points that could be salient.
1) When thinking about the coding job, don’t put a lot of emphasis on the monetary component unless you seriously need the money. You are probably earning less than you would be in a full time job, and your time is really valuable at the moment. On the other hand, if you need the money immediately or are interested in the job primarily because of networking opportunities or career advancement, then it is a different matter.
2) Keeping up a good GPA is not equivalent to learning the material well. There are certainly corners you could cut which would reduce the amount of work you need to do without losing much of the educational benefit. As the saying goes, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the results. If you are pressed for time, you may need to accept that some of your work will have to be “good enough” and not your personal best. Having said that, be very careful here, cause this is also an easy way to undermine yourself. “This isn’t really the important stuff” is a fully general excuse.
I’m having trouble finding the original sequence post that mentions it, but a “fully general excuse” refers to an excuse that can be applied to anything, independently of the truth value of the thing. In this case, what I mean is that “this isn’t really the important stuff” can sound reasonable even when applied to the stuff that actually is important (especially if you don’t think about it too long). It follows that if you accept that as a valid excuse but don’t keep an eye on your behavior, you may find yourself labeling whatever you don’t want to do at the moment as “not really important”—which leads to important work not getting done.
My advice would be to get just a minor in Math so you can get some easy electives in. if you’re considering a career change out of computer science as a possibility and just creating options then there are very few grad schools that would accept a math major but not a math minor. In the job market, a CS plus math minor is probably not going to be a big difference from a double major. This may not be the case for all possibilities but it should hold for most of them. Certainly most employers are going to compliment you then shrug for programming jobs.
I have two pieces of advice for you. Please take them with a grain of salt—this is merely my opinion and I am by no means an expert in the matter. Note that I can’t really recommend that you do things one way or another, but I thought I would bring up some points that could be salient.
1) When thinking about the coding job, don’t put a lot of emphasis on the monetary component unless you seriously need the money. You are probably earning less than you would be in a full time job, and your time is really valuable at the moment. On the other hand, if you need the money immediately or are interested in the job primarily because of networking opportunities or career advancement, then it is a different matter.
2) Keeping up a good GPA is not equivalent to learning the material well. There are certainly corners you could cut which would reduce the amount of work you need to do without losing much of the educational benefit. As the saying goes, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the results. If you are pressed for time, you may need to accept that some of your work will have to be “good enough” and not your personal best. Having said that, be very careful here, cause this is also an easy way to undermine yourself. “This isn’t really the important stuff” is a fully general excuse.
Thanks for the response.
Re: 1) I’m not as focused on the money as on the programming opportunities it might later lead to.
Re: 2) I agree with everything here. What do you mean in your last sentence?
I’m having trouble finding the original sequence post that mentions it, but a “fully general excuse” refers to an excuse that can be applied to anything, independently of the truth value of the thing. In this case, what I mean is that “this isn’t really the important stuff” can sound reasonable even when applied to the stuff that actually is important (especially if you don’t think about it too long). It follows that if you accept that as a valid excuse but don’t keep an eye on your behavior, you may find yourself labeling whatever you don’t want to do at the moment as “not really important”—which leads to important work not getting done.
The post is “Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People”. See also the wiki page on fully general counterarguments.
Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for.
My advice would be to get just a minor in Math so you can get some easy electives in. if you’re considering a career change out of computer science as a possibility and just creating options then there are very few grad schools that would accept a math major but not a math minor. In the job market, a CS plus math minor is probably not going to be a big difference from a double major. This may not be the case for all possibilities but it should hold for most of them. Certainly most employers are going to compliment you then shrug for programming jobs.