While digging through some files, I found my college transcript from — looks at calendar — 13 years ago and thought it might be fun to jot down some recollections.
I took a few AP tests in high school and got out of intro chemistry and calculus freshman year. It's still interesting that after a decade or so of school before university, a handful of transfer credits from AP tests are the only things that carry over.
I actually started off as a mechanical engineering major, hence taking ME 170. It was cool to play around with CAD for a semester, but ultimately not what I wanted to do.
My AP physics score wasn't high enough and I didn't pass the exam to get credit for multivariable calculus, so even though I took both PHYS 211 and MATH 241 in high school, I had to take them again freshman year.
After quickly deciding to switch to a CS major, I had to take CS 125 and CS 173 before the program would let me officially transfer in. Which is so much easier than today, since you're apparently no longer allowed to move into the CS program from within the university.
Learning data structures in CS 225 was one of the top two most important software dev classes I took. Useful for day to day coding fundamentals (and passing interviews).
CS 460 was pretty neat, we read articles like Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit and then implemented them in the computer lab.
I remember putting a certain penny arcade comic in a presentation for my CS 210 ethics class. Got a good score on it, but the teacher wasn't fond of the cursing.
Hands down, my favorite class at university was CS 242. This class had a weekly programming assignment that you could solve in any number of ways, but you would have to present your solution to a small group of other students and a TA. This meant you saw the different ways that everyone in your group approached the same problem.
Some weeks, the assignment would build up off of the previous week's work (without you knowing ahead of time), so if you wrote clean code, you'd be better off than if you quickly hacked something together and left yourself with a bunch of techdebt.
Probably the closest class in college to actually having a software job.
Along with data structures, CS 473 is the other of the top two most important software dev classes. I still recommend Erickson's algorithms textbook as a canonical reference for learning or reviewing this topic.
When a student asked if dancing would be on the final exam, the answer was yes! We got a final where every question was about dancing.
During my last year of college, I had to finish up some gen eds and decided to start taking some extra math classes like MATH 417 for fun.
CS 598 with LaValle was a super interesting dive into relevant research papers (and the only grad-level course I've taken).
My senior thesis for CS 499 was A primer on covering spaces for robot exploration, which was essentially a variation of the art gallery problem.