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Subject: Re: Chess Programmers -- take note: M. N. J. van Kervinck's Master's The

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 08:53:20 08/22/02

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On August 21, 2002 at 23:10:24, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 21, 2002 at 15:27:00, Roy Eassa wrote:
>
>>On August 21, 2002 at 14:58:05, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>And of course many top CS programs don't even have master's thesis as a
>>>requirement.
>>
>>
>>And at least one (MIT) requires a thesis for a _Bachelor's_ degree in CS (or at
>>least they did 20 years ago).
>
>That is surprising.  20 years ago (1982) saw my old university with 2,000
>undergraduate CS majors, graduating almost 400 that year.  No way we could
>have handled 400 theses in a single year, with 25 faculty.  No way we _would_
>have tried to handle that many.  :)


Actually I graduated MIT in 1981.  The professor who was my Thesis Advisor was
not in the Computer Science department.  In fact, I don't think it's even
required that your thesis be in the same discipline as your undergraduate
degree.  Mine dealt with getting microcomputers (that's what we called them in
the days before the IBM PC came out) into secondary schools and overcoming
teachers' fear/ignorance of them (among other obstacles such as
security/vandalism).  I worked with an inner-city high school in developing a
program that actually stayed in effect for years after my graduation.  My thesis
was not even remotely rigorous computer science, although there was some simple
programming involved (in Applesoft Basic for the Apple II!).  It was more of a
social thing I guess.  I was stunned to find my name in the card catalog (now
electronic of course) in the MIT engineering library many these years later.  I
guess the undergrad thesis at MIT is more like a term project / term paper
combination.  All I remember of mine is that its subtitle was "Teaching Teachers
While Teaching Teenagers" which sounds _really_ corny 21 years later.



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