TESU Eliminates SOME Study.com Transfer Credits [unconfirmed]

[LevelUP]

Computer architecture  Done. Discrete math. Done.   Now I just have to keep My fingers crossed that it all gets graded and submitted to tesu in time. Glory to God. And  Thanks to this forum.

Amen!

If u think doing CS degree online or B&M will give much knowledge- wake up . Most of Graduates are clueless about basics after their degrees..... it alll comes to self learning , so no University degrees will give u much knowledge in the field......
Degree is mostly for check box to pass HR for bigger companies. In many cases u stilll have to self learn to be able to pass multiple interviews......

A CS degree is a checkbox degree though IMO it's one of the most highly respected computer technology degrees since usually, they require extra math versus an IT degree.  I agree that self-learning will make up more than 1/2 of your knowledge in this field.

You can do a variety of jobs with this degree.  Some people might start with an IT support job, and some might go into frontend development.  There is nothing wrong with those types of jobs.  Those jobs still pay $60,000 to six figures a year.

A person that can design all of the core features of Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter in a matter of a few days is hardly an ordinary type of person that isn't valuable.

Nothing is stopping you from grabbing an open-source AI, modifying the training data, and using that for your project or side hustle.  You don't need a degree for this.

When you can get users foaming at the mouth for your content or software application, the sky is the limit to how valuable you are.

[rachel83az]

I'm pretty sure that only really students of places like MIT and maybe Georgia Tech actually graduate with the skills and knowledge needed to do stuff with their CS/IT degrees without having to study any on the side. And that's why graduates of THOSE SPECIFIC SCHOOLS are in high demand. The extra study is baked into the curriculum. Most other schools just make certain classes "difficult" without actually imparting more knowledge. Like schools/teachers that automatically fail the bottom X% of certain classes, even if every single student manages to get what would be a 3.8+ average in any other class. That's just making things harder for the sake of making things harder.

[armstrongsubero]

@LevelUP You're right nothing is stopping you from taking SOMETHING SOMEONE ELSE DESIGNED and modifying it to suit your needs. It's what technicians and technologists do all the time. In software dev we call them "code monkeys" and they are known to say things like "google is my best friend" and "I can do that" then ask them to build something they grab a template and start coding away without so much as a wireframe mockup.

Funny you should mention AI. We recently began working on a AI driven monocular navigation system. There were no models we could deploy, just a lot of research papers, some of the content even I and my colleagues agree were really dense, and I read that kinda stuff for fun. How many 3 month self-taught people do you know can take research papers, slog through the math and train a model based on that paper then deploy it on custom hardware? These guys have better say in "AI policy" or "AI ethics" or "AI social interaction" or "AI inclusivity" not in hardcore, bleeding edge stuff.

I know very few people doing bleeding edge AI research, maybe FAANG? The rest of us are just trying to improve model efficiency to turning those papers into real models etc. and the majority of us just want someone who knows enough to determine why our customers leave our website etc. and still the turnover on those jobs is HIGH. -These things require more depth than modifying an opensource project. Anyone can do Dr. Adrian's PyImageSearch or fast.ai and get a project up and running with OpenCV and Keras or Caffe but how many of those people can do production code?

Engineering is a different mindset. You actually design the tools other people work with. In my line of work for example, board bring up and writing drivers are where I get the most contracts. A lot of people can hire in house persons to do high level stuff AFTER the initial framework has been laid out. And even then finding quality C/C++ engineers with deep hardware troubleshooting knowledge is very difficult. You won't believe my Microchip technology SAMD series on YT was the first in the world to cover bare metal SAMD programming and I've gotten contracts just for something simple as that! That was just some free time fun stuff I did to help Arduino hobbyists looking to do deeper, and professional engineers contacted me for help, like really to port to SAMD or from SAMD to STM32 and troubleshoot issues they were having etc. Some of these companies have some very complex stuff, but their in house devs struggle with bare metal board bring up and low level troubleshooting, also at really making C compact and efficient and squeezing GCC for every clock cycle. If you did a course in assembly language, comp architecture and compiler design you will sure be able to do stuff like that, took years to discover those skills and even I learnt a few things from my college courses.

You do have a point though, finding someone to develop "all the core features" of those apps FB, Netflix etc. in a couple of days is VERY difficult!! Do you have any idea how hard it is to handle all that user load!? The core of those apps is the distributed computing and graph topology aspect. Not to mention security and 99.999% uptime!!! Not to mention real time video streaming across multiple platforms Where is such a person in a few days you say!? Just planning that scale of a globally distributed app will take seasoned software architects a month or two.

Those are the core features of those apps. Distributivity. Redundancy. High Uptime. Soft Realtime Performance.

If you mean putting the latest hipster JS framework and some Python or JS backend together to provide the "look and feel" functionality of such an app sure, bring any software engineer a cup of coffee or two and in a few hours all that functionality will be duplicated.

If you want to go into IT support then do an IT degree. CS is NOT IT and CS is NOT software engineering. I did YouTube videos on those actually a few years back.

CS vs IT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT45rQw3WWQ

CS vs SE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3n0u1pdZ-I

You're right though a CS degree is the ME degree of tech, and (sorry sparkies) is more valuable than a hard EE degree these tdays in terms of employment availability. Very flexible, sure you can do support desk work (an AAS, A+, NET+, CCNA is a better fit for this BTW) or front end dev (do a bootcamp, you only need a degree cause these jobs have fierce competition, I can get a guy to do it for half the pay, takes quarter the time and 10 times the experience as you) but why limit yourself!? Go for gold! Be a 1%. The 99% do the grunt work, but the 1% developers, rockstars, snobs, however you call them are the ones that make Facebook or Netflix what is is.

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@racheal83az ALL students have to study on the side. In college you may learn binary or AVL trees, come into the real world and you're thrown into a ROS stack, its full of behavior trees. The thing is you should be able to learn it fast.

A degree gives you the foundation you need to LEARN more you get a lot of breath not depth.

For example in college you do a course on Operating Systems. Lets say you get a job at a startup like lets say building wireless senor nodes for an IoT mesh (very common these days) you never touched an RTOS, but I give you a week or so to mess around with Contiki-NG, you should be able to understand what semaphores are, pre-emptive scheduling, mutual exclusions, deadlock etc. The next week you're learning about SPI, I2C and UART and setting your tools up. I expect you to be able to read the sepcification docs, a few whitepapers and understand the terminology. In your computer architecture class you did timing diagrams, these will help you understand how the protocols work.

Let's say a few months later we decide to switch to Wifi 6. I give you a whitepaper or two to read, if a little discrete math and calc stuff, some stuff abour TCP/IP etc. is in there I expect you to understand it.

Again we decide to downsize from a Cortex M4 to a Cortex M0+, maybe you did a class in C or assembly in college, you should be able to help porting functions, help with testing etc.

In 2 years you'll be niche in embedded real time systems. In college your foundational class on operating systems was build upon to the point you can look at a disassembler in Keil, change the Cortex M task to perform manual context switching using Systick and Pendsv heck you might be able to write a basic Kernel. All the other classes you did may not come into play, but it will help a lot compared to someone who did a bootcamp learning node.js.

Again CS/IT they are not the same. I would NOT expect an IT grad to do that. Embedded jobs ask for CS, EE, CE. An IT grad might be able to recommend a good IoT system for the office thermometers, but I won't expect them to be able to design one.

Just as I wont expect a CS grad to fire up Cisco IOS and configure my router. Sure a CS grad with CCNA could do that job, but the degree prepares you for the other jobs.

Don't underestimate the power of a CS degree that you actually learnt the material. You could work on some very interesting stuff.

The CS grad who has passion that got into embedded systems. 10 years later he's working at Tesla, Toyota or Meta or some Medical company designing gadgets that will be released to market in years, maybe top secret military equipment. He is working on things that will shape the world of tomorrow. He makes whatever he demands, and if he became a domain expert might have spun off, has his own company, doing consulting or building some weird gadget for some weird industry no one ever heard making a fortune. 10 more on top of that maybe he picked up a PhD and is doing research in academia or industry working on what he loves, the son of a gun maybe has a patent or two under his name.

The IT grad is in 10 years in ISM, maybe in charge of a company IT department, heck he may make more than the CS grad who was never chasing money depending on the company he is working for, he may read about some of the things the CS grad is working on. This discovery made, that gadget he wants to buy the CS grad worked on, that patent etc

The guy who got the tick the box degree, if he's ivy league who went on to Google to work, quit and did a startup, maybe he succeeded, maybe he didn't, you will be hearing about it in his course he's selling you though "Ex-google employee teaches coding". If he's not IVY League he may be stuck in a dead end job, maybe he made it to manager, maybe he washed out and left the industry.

Like I said don't underestimate your CS degree, it doesn't matter what school you went to. Sometimes its better to be a big fish in a little pond. Let's say you get into academia, some of the stuff you want to research may not be offered at an IVY, so you go to another school, publish excellent research and get funding to do what you love.

I guess what I'm saying is apply yourself! you will be surprised where genuine passion can take you! An interviewer can always tell the tick the box guys! nothing is wrong with being such a person, but you'll have more fun, have a more fulfilling career and be happier if you really absorb your material.

Again look at my industry, embededded systems. Look at Michel Barr of Barr group! The guy has his own coding standard that the industry follows. When it comes to embedded, the guy was called alongside NASA to testify in the Toyota acceleration issue, I mentioned earlier. He isn't ivy, but he loves what he does. Aim to be someone like that. Look also at Jack Ganssle, Jacob Beiningo etc. These are guys you probably never heard of but in this industry there names are like "albert einstein" or "micheal jackson".

No IVY league degree required. A degree in Math, EE, CS, CE is golden once you apply yourself. You can work to become a niche expert, go into academia or industry research don't limit yourself.

[louise]

So this is going to make it impossible to get a CS degree at TESU unless you take CS courses at TESU or RA sources? I'm pretty upset I didn't get an email about this from TESU. I feel like I've had the rug pulled out from under me.

It was a lowball move that TESU did. 

You can waste time dwelling on it going through the 5 stages of grief or move on.

There's no reason to be rude to me. I asked a simple question and expressed disappointment.

In the past, TESU told people about things like this in advance - so they'd maybe make a decision that was going to go into effect on March 31, and tell you on January 1 what the deal was.  It only applied to ENROLLED students, which is why we tell everyone who wants to get a degree at TESU to enroll right away.

Anyway, this is only from one advisor, hopefully they are wrong and TESU will give everyone some time to complete these courses.

In the meantime, you do have 12 days remaining to complete these courses, so my advice is to do at least 1 of them if not all 3.  It sucks, but it's all you can do.

The main issue you may come across with Discrete Math is that many schools won't allow you to take it without having taken other math courses first.  And they may not count any ACE/NCCRS credit you have.  So if you had calculus done via Study.com or SL, the school isn't going to let you take it.  So that might be one you want to do.  

COMPSCI 306: Computer Architecture is another good option to take because it's UL, and those are harder to find inexpensively.

The last thing to keep in mind is that you can always do a 16cr term at TESU and get those remaining courses done that way.  You can even study ahead of time, so that the course will be easier to do (I'm thinking of taking Study.com's Discrete Math course first, not for credit, and then taking Discrete Math at TESU).  That kind of thing is totally doable.

Thank you for the advice. I really appreciate it. Unfortunately, with my current work schedule I won't be able to speed anything up. I'll just have to reevaluate and see if TESU is still the best option for me. I'm working on a career transition, but my timeline is a lot slower than most people here, but I'm slowly getting there.

[LevelUP]

You can do a lot with a CS degree.

I wish there were more options for classes.

[rachel83az]

It would be nice if there were more options, yeah. I haven't been able to find any Computer Architecture course that doesn't require prerequisites or that is cheaper than TESU; usually classes are both more expensive AND have multiple prerequisites. Which, I suppose, is fair enough. I've only done as well as I have in the SDC course because of prior knowledge. Some came from just life in general, some came from the Google IT course, some came from the other things I've done while on the way to a TESU CS degree.

Final exam: 76/100. Practice exam scores: 78%, 70%.

If you still haven't taken the final exam yet, take the practice exam 2 or 3 times to get exposure to as many of the questions as possible. It was luck of the draw; many of the final exam questions were almost exactly the same as the quiz/practice exam questions.

[Cofffeee]

UMPI CS would be hit if they would offer it through YourPace.(specially now)

[bjcheung77]

Thank you for the advice. I really appreciate it. Unfortunately, with my current work schedule I won't be able to speed anything up. I'll just have to reevaluate and see if TESU is still the best option for me. I'm working on a career transition, but my timeline is a lot slower than most people here, but I'm slowly getting there.

I would continue treading through all the alternative courses you need for TESU, unless something different comes along. As long as you're working towards that goal, the speed at which you're working at won't really matter for TESU. If you're going for a Competency Based degree program, one option would be WGU, they have both a BSCS and a BS Software Development.

[Lee586]

So they are still accepting the Python course after 12/31 correct? Talking to TESU advising can be a bit confusing.

Also, all the credits I have transferred in from Study.com are still good right? I'm just 9 credits away from degree completion. Liberal Arts Capstone, Computer Architecture, and one Lower Level CS Elective (which is why I'm taking Python). I am currently taking Computer Architecture at another school and going to transfer it in. The assignment on Study was a little hectic.

[Pats20]

The way I understand it is as long as they’re completed by 12/31/21.

I requested transcripts to be sent to tesu from sdc 10 days ago and still haven’t seen anything on it. I can’t remember how long it usually takes. I figured they’re probably slower because of the holidays. Sdc was very fast on their end.