Thanks for the reply. Whatever university math courses I take I suppose I'll be signing up for whatever advanced sections are available just to try them, even though they often seem to be based on contest scores across the board (which I personally dislike, but meh)

Off topic but yes I love analysis :D Currently (re-)teaching myself Calculus out of Spivak (which in the preface is supposed to be basic analysis), supplemented with stuff on metric spaces in the like. In the little spare time I have left I've picked up bits and pieces of measure theory and even though I don't (currently) plan on majoring in pure math, this makes me interested enough to at least consider it as a minor :P (Okay this is long enough so I'll stop now)

I was looking at the posts in the FB group and there are so many people with lots of programming experience. I have almost none at all...how screwed am I?

I'm in CS btw.

Learning functional languages (Scheme, Haskell, erlang) and then procedural/imperative languages (C, Java, ruby) is much easier than the other way around. Prior prgramming experience often makes things much harder. Particularly object-oriented experience (C++, Java).

O_O, I am screwed...

So, yes, when you start learning a language like Scheme after Java/C++, you really make yourself become inflexible. I'm learning even more OOP before I (might) go to UW next year (if I get accepted).

So, why is OOP that bad?

There are lots of upper-year CS scholarships. See

http://safa.uwaterloo.ca...ships/currentawards.html

Was any of you off campus dons or pink/black tie leaders during this orientations? :O

Greygoose, are you at UW tomorrow? It would be awesome if waterfall and I can meet you in person.

Of course you can. I'm doing that now. But the problem is that your diploma will say BMath instead of BCS and it won't say which courses you audited. So you have to prove to the interviewer that you can do the stuff you learned.

I am not sure of where I could find a link; however, I do know that there are a number of CS-only entrance scholarships, having attended a Math Faculty awards ceremony.



I've been around since the beginning of frosh week :) If you came to either the CSC code party or MathSoc's wine and cheese thing last night, I was there...



Sitting in on a course is not going to teach you very much. The second and third year CS courses have the majority of their learning material in the assignments. Many of the fourth year courses are project courses.

It's not so much an issue with what your diploma says... after all, it's hard to really say that having a BCS implies any real knowledge of CS to begin with. It's easy to scrape by through a degree without knowing anything. Convincing an interviewer you know what's up is much more important, because they don't actually care much about your education at all. They care about your skills.



That's ridiculous. There's basically no difference (it's very minor, only a few courses). Now, some people might say, well, math courses are more valuable than CS courses, so the BMath degree teaches you more. I would say that it is true that many of the math courses are significantly better than the CS courses, but that doesn't mean that a BMath student will have taken them. So it's really a toss-up...

EDIT: I meant to say, I would encourage someone to take a BMath just so they have the opportunity to take more math courses, but in the end what the piece of paper you get says doesn't really matter.