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Wellness Wednesday for August 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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So, I'm at college now. After dozens of minutes spent researching schools, many sleepless nights spent putting off homework, and endless effort spent on not giving a shit, I'm here, and I'm...not disappointed in myself, exactly, but I absolutely could have done better.

As I alluded to, I didn't really care all that much about being attractive to colleges in high school, but I now regret it, at least a bit. I had a 99th percentile SAT and plenty of AP and dual enrollment credits, but my lack of extracurriculars and thoroughly mediocre GPA sunk my application to the point where I only truly got into one of the five schools I bothered to apply to. While I didn't really have a "dream school", my current university is on its face significantly lower-ranked than my top pick; by median SAT scores, my preferred school is about 15 percentile points higher than my current school with a particularly prestigious CS program (my major) to boot.

Regarding my current situation, I ask a couple questions of the Mottizen public:

1.] How important is your alma mater for job opportunities with a CS degree? While I want to transfer to my preferred school for a variety of pragmatic and personal reasons, I do have a not-insignificant scholarship at my current institution. It wouldn't ruin me financially to forgo it as my college fund should cover the brunt of it, but it is a counterbalancing factor. (N.B: I have now seen this thread partially answering this question. I'd still like to know how much it matters for CS specifically.)

2.] What are job prospects for a CS degree looking like in the next 5-10 years? I've heard that the CS bubble has popped and I'm fine with not having a junior position handed to me on a silver platter, but I wouldn't mind switching tracks to a different engineering degree (and consequently removing much of my incentive to transfer) if CS is headed for the shitcan thanks to AI/oversaturation/whatever.