[plt-scheme] Last year students...

It's a workplace norm issue.

In design fields, the norm for interviewing a candidate is to ask for a 
portfolio of work.   If one goes for a website design job, that's still 
a norm --- show examples of past work.  Specialty schools like Parsons 
School of Design arrange the last year so each graduate can accumulate a 
portfolio from class projects.

If programmers were viewed as program designers, rather than as design 
seamstresses, they would be asked for portfolios too.

In textile/fashion, seamstresses are trained differently from designers. 
 Whereas, in a CS curriculum, the two groups are offered the same 
courses and meet the same requirements.

Courses that lead to portfolio quality work can help.   When I was at 
Yale long ago, the "in" thing to do was to program games.  A modern 
variant on that is a backgammon neural net.  It's not hard to do and 
exercises many skills.  Setting up a monitor to view shocks applied to 
its network by training examples is enlightening.

Matthias Felleisen wrote:

>
> On Apr 21, 2006, at 10:26 AM, Prabhakar Ragde wrote:
>
>> programming contests, which from my point of view are counterproductive.
>
>
> AMEN.
>
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