Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:14:56 08/22/02
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On August 22, 2002 at 11:53:20, Roy Eassa wrote: >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. OK... both places I have taught at (University of Southern Mississippi and University of Alabama at Birmingham) have an "honors college". And _all_ of their graduates have to do that. But, in general, the honors thesis can be done anywhere, not just in the department of your major... So perhaps MIT took "everybody" to be a sort of honors graduate... But asking a CS faculty to handle that many theses would cause an earthquake, I am afraid. :)
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