Disclaimer, I am in no way affiliated with brilliant.org but am a happy user. Do yourself a favor and invest in a brilliant.org membership (there should be a trial period, but tell yourself if you like it and stick with it you’ll consider buying the lifetime membership). Then do all the Logic Courses. You could work your way through their Computer Science stuff after that. They are actually pretty fun and making mistakes is all part of the process and viewing the answers will often correct what you missed. The way it works is you are given multiple choice or fill in the blank questions usually with only one right answer. The problem statements are very exact and taking in all the relevant information is necessary. Then you kind of have to deduce for yourself the answers. Brilliant.org is literally the best investment I’ve ever made to increase my mathematical ability second only to University where I took up to discrete math. I would definitely do the trial period though because it may not be for everyone. I have mostly used it to review material that I basically should already know so I don’t know how difficult it would be for someone approaching it at a perspective of not knowing much about the subjects. But, Brilliant setups up prerequisites for each course so you should know atleast what you could work on before certain ones. Best of luck and I hope someone tries it after this recommendation because I truly do love the platform.
Hey no problem with asking late though sometimes people may not respond or they may take a while though I have hacker news replies setup [1], so I sometimes have to get through my 300+ emails per week (mostly marketing emails [just saying I’m not that popular haha]). I actually was doing it at Utah State University (USU) and I was on Campus my distance-ed program was across different campuses for a University that has multiple campuses across Utah. So, I’m not sure if they have many people that do off campus distance ed classes.
I loved my University though. They were accredited for their CS program (not sure how important that is honestly in fact I only learned about that because I had to do an exit interview). Though there are many arguably better Universities in Utah such as BYU and U of U to name a fewer, I’ve come to believe that pretty much any University will likely give you a world class education. Also Utah State is a research University which is an added bonus, because it helps to have teachers that research in their field. I felt I got a really good grasp on the theoretical principles there. My favorite course was probably Discrete Mathematics at USU. It helped me get a good grasp on abstract thinking (might as well bring that up since this thread is about that). I really recommend anyone take something similar to Discrete Math by starting to go through the readings for the Mathematics for Computer Science course from MIT Open Course Ware and possibly the videos too (OCW) (e.g. [2] or [3]). Reading the beginning of the Math for Computer Science course manual prepared me for my Discrete Math class so well (In fact I ended getting over a 100% final grade because the teacher had to move the grading curve, because likely too many were likely not doing so good). Usually before you take a class like that you need to take Calculus, but really all you need to know from Calculus to complete that class is likely sums and series. Any ways best of luck with your studies and if you plan on doing online education I’m not sure the best University to do it through. I was really glad that I was able to attend University on campus though, because though I can be disciplined I feel like I lack that discipline whenever I don’t have enough pressure to keep me focused and not get distracted on other things. Again best of luck in studies!
