I am just wondering, how much math is involved in CS?I have a total of 8 (one semester)university math courses, and a few of my upper level CS courses were quite math heavy (but generally along the lines of proofs). That was what was required of me for Acadia's Honours degree; I think the people not doing Honours had 5. Those more basic 5 include Calculus I & II, and the 3 courses geared towards CS people that I know at some schools would get CS course codes and not Math course codes (for at least some of them). Those 3 courses included stuff like: Proof by induction, and some other proof stuff, permutations & combinations, symbolic logic, graph theory, matrix stuff, the math behind some encryption methods, and some other things that I could write the name of but would probably be meaningless to you ;)
Also, what kind of jobs can you get with a CS degree, would you end up doing mindless bottom of the barell type programming, or is there actually interesting stuff that you can do?I think problem solving is at the root of most jobs you'd get with a CS degree; programming is not usually "mindless".
This site can probably offer you a far better description than I can.
How much experience with programming do people usually have when they go into the degree?Most people have taken a high school progamming class or two, although the intro programming courses usually don't assume any knowledge (at some schools I believe they split it into a course for those who have taken CS in high school and another for those who haven't, but more often it's just one course that assumes you haven't programmed before).
And, since there is so much new stuff being learned about computers and such, does your degree kind of become obsolete quickly as new stuff is being learnedThere are new developments you have to keep up with in any field. At the same time, a lot stays the same too. C has been a popular language for 20-30 years, and a great number of other languages (C++ is an extension of it; a lot of the basic syntax of Java is the same or similar) are very related to it - if you learned C 20 years ago, what you learned then is still very useful even if you are now using Java. CS degrees are about teaching the theory and the fundamentals, not about teaching the ins and outs of the 3 hottest programming languages at the time.
