Day 45 — Saturday

April 3, 2021

Today at a glance

Today I was on the road, driving from Nashville to Durham. I took this time to get ahead on some CS 201 videos/reading quizzes. I also did some reading from Berkeley CS 61B's online textbook Hug61B.

For class:

• Watched CS 201 video on greedy algorithms

  • Completed reading quiz

• Watched CS 201 video on compression

  • Completed reading quiz

On my own:

• Read section 1 of Hug61B

  • 1.1, 1.2

• Configured domain CNAME to set up a subdomain on my site that redirects here! cs.bobqian.com

What's on my mind

Today, I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the thoroughness of the content in Hug61B. I only read the first section and skimmed through the HW and lab activities, but I found myself shocked at how in-depth it was.

I've had doubts about the rigorousness of CS at Duke, especially in terms of how it compares to a degree at Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Stanford, etc. I told myself in the past that the content was surely the same everywhere, and that wasn't my biggest worry at the time anyway.

It still isn't a worry of mine — in the sense that I can't do anything about it — but today that old doubt came back in full force. On the very first lab of Berkeley 61B — the equivalent course to our CS 201 — there was a huge reading and exercise on Git, branching, and rebase.

Meanwhile, we've been doing the same add, commit, and push commands for the entire semester.

Seeing the immediate rigor of 61B made me feel so silly for ever thinking that our CS project docs were too convoluted or that the projects themselves were too complex.

To be fair, Berkeley does walk you through the steps much better, but at the same time they don't hold your hand as much once you actually understand what to do.

For example, we get code stems for nearly every project, and even when we don't, we're often basing our code off of an existing class. Our Project 1 was the same as Berkeley's (both were NBody) — except they had to write it from scratch, while we had entire methods already written and only needed to fill in a line or two.

It puts it in perspective when kids here complain about the CS projects being too difficult. I never had anything to compare it to, but after recently completing P6 Percolation (and it being a breeze now that I'm actually serious about CS) and now seeing what Project NBody looked like for Berkeley kids, I realize just how easy we have it.

And I find myself feeling inferior because of it! I wonder if I'm going to be at a disadvantage because of the lack of rigor.

I'm not exactly worried about the degree overall — I don't really care if our, say, Computer Architecture course is less in-depth — but for DSA, I really want to nail this concept so I can do well in interviews. My worry is over this course specifically.