Brand new programming students

Many students enter the computer science field expecting to stare at a computer for eight hours a day writing code. What many students will come to find is that generally this is not true. While coding is an integral part of computer science the true hunk of what makes a good computer scientist good is not his or her programming abilities but his or her ability to formulate efficient algorithms. Learning a language inside and out is a great skill to have and will help further ones knowledge of the field but this skills usefulness may be short lived. Just 15 years ago no one had even heard of or wanted to program in Java but it is now one of the largest and most widely used languages in the world. With the shifts from one language to another moving as fast as they do it is wise for students to focus on their studies of algorithms and not so much the intricacies of certain languages.

Companies in today’s market are searching for good engineers not code monkeys. Microsoft even has a position titled "Program Manager" and many Program Managers are usually assigned to a project. The Program Manager is typically a computer scientist who almost never writes any code. Instead they focus on the overall design of the software and how the different components will fit together.

Therefore if I may offer new students a word of advice it would be this. Complete all your assignments in lab and seek to gain knowledge in your language of choice however pay closer attention to the algorithms you are using your language to represent and the general principles that the assignments are attempting to display.