Prefacing this I am only 20 years old so I have some time to figure it all out but I feel like I am missing out a fair bit on not pursuing a degree in computer science. A lot of the content, especially the focus on algorithms, seems really interesting to me.
Straight out of high school I did not have the math grades for CS so I went to the American equivalent of community college and am on track to get a diploma from an IT related course thats basically going to amount to a web dev job in the future. If I decided to go that route for lets say 5 years to save some money would it be a hindrance career wise, because of a large time gap in the resume, to take the 4 years off to get a CS degree from a decent school, say Waterloo?
The biggest point of fear is that I would not be able to complete the degree and realizing it was to above my cognitive abilities.
Time spent in university isn't usually seen as a gap. Most employers would admire that your chose to go back to school so you could really understand the fundamentals.
Right now, I'm prepping for a Computer Science degree. I find I just can't study mathematics at a pace that's as fast as a Uni course goes. I really find I need to understand the underlying concepts of the math, so it takes me a bit longer but I seem to be able to hold a lot more info, and my progress is getting quicker.
As an example, it took me some time to grasp that the determinant is the size of a square matrix, and that a one-dimensional matrix gives the distance, a two dimensional matrix gives the area of a parallelogram, and a three dimensional matrix gives the volume of a parallelopiped. After that it became easier to understand how to get the determinant of an n-dimensional matrix.
Same with vectors and trigonometry.
I'm finding that self study with a little help from Google is really paying off!
Straight out of high school I did not have the math grades for CS so I went to the American equivalent of community college and am on track to get a diploma from an IT related course thats basically going to amount to a web dev job in the future. If I decided to go that route for lets say 5 years to save some money would it be a hindrance career wise, because of a large time gap in the resume, to take the 4 years off to get a CS degree from a decent school, say Waterloo?
The biggest point of fear is that I would not be able to complete the degree and realizing it was to above my cognitive abilities.