Mar-07-2020, 09:18 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar-07-2020, 01:09 PM by Gribouillis.)
Several points need to be considered IMHO
- You take it for granted that you are going to fool the math examiner on your level in mathematics through rote learning, but this is far from obvious to me and you need to consider the possibility that this strategy may lead you to fail at the entrance exam.
- If there are math questions at the entrance exam, it is probably because some of the courses need a certain math level and you will find yourself struggling with these courses and perhaps fail because of this. Again, the teachers will soon discover your actual level in mathematics.
- Whatever your choice, it seems obvious to me that you need to study math properly in order to acquire the level needed for this curriculum. You can perhaps do this in parallel with your studies. I teach math and I know that you can find textbooks and exercices online for every possible level in mathematics. Like programming, skills in maths come from practice. If you do seriously a single math exercise every day, your level may increase dramatically. It has similarities with body-building.
- I'm not so sure math is that important to professional software engineers (which I'm not). Logical thinking and reasoning is, but it can also be acquired by practicing programming. Of course, it depends on your subject of interest. A good knowledge of statistics will certainly help if you work on machine learning, and a high level in partial differential equations will help if you program subsoil imaging in geophysics. Math won't probably help you much if you are designing commercial websites. Software engineering is a vast domain.
- Being 25, it would be better of course if you don't waste a year. Only you can determine if it is possible.