HACKER Q&A
📣 olzhasar

Going to a community college as an experienced engineer?


I’m a back-end engineer with about 6 years of professional experience. I live in Central Asia and have been working remotely in US for the past 3 years. Due to the large time zone differences, it’s becoming harder to cope with this schedule as I age. So I’m looking for ways to immigrate to US.

I tried applying to big tech companies, but it’s been pretty silent so far, perhaps due to the recent layoffs. So I was thinking about obtaining a masters in cs in US which could be helpful considering the fact that I don’t have any formal CS education. However, it’s pretty damn expensive to afford.

I recently discovered a community college phenomenon for myself but I am not sure whether they worth the effort. Does anyone have experience studying CS in a community college? Do you think it’s a good time investment for an experienced engineer?

  👤 linguae Accepted Answer ✓
When I was in high school, I took a few computer science courses at my local community college. At least in California, the community college curriculum represents the first two years of an undergraduate education. In computer science, this means courses in introductory programming (typically thought under an imperative or object-oriented paradigm), introductory data structures and algorithms, discrete mathematics, and computer organization.

The challenge for someone who already has years of software engineering experience is that the courses may be too elementary for you, depending on the type of work that you did. However, it might be worth taking a course in discrete mathematics since the topics learned in that course will appear repeatedly in subsequent upper-division courses that you’d take at a university should you continue your education.

👤 bombcar
The normal “trick” is to find a community college where you can transfer to a state school after half the degree or similar.

Then you graduate from the state school and nobody knows about your community college experience.

I’ve done some studying at CCs and I’d say it’s decent if not phenomenal.