Hahaha, I went through the masters of comp sci program there. Those commits mentioning Borja cracked me up, and I swear "i love the smell of segfaults in the morning" was written on the wall in the big lecture room in the physical sciences building. Gives me flashbacks - that program was brutal (though really good).
Just looking at this one course and the projects... This is night and day harder than anything I had to do in my CS program. We just dicked around in Java for most of it, no C, and definitely no low level socket programming or reproducing an RFC.
I had (1992, man.ac.uk) VDM, Pascal, SML, Prolog, midi-port communication in 68000 assembly, Pascal-with-embedded-Oracle, Tarski's World, etc., and not a single damned thing from that course has been useful since.
Yeah I came in thinking it would be easy after crushing the programming pre-req tests. Was in for a complete surprise - they don't mess around at UChicago.
In the masters program you can somewhat build your own degree after taking their core classes, so you can at least study what you're really interested in (or avoid the hard stuff like a lot of people did). Most of the profs had real industry experience too. A C++ class for example was taught by a guy who sold his company, now is a research fellow at a huge lab, and sits on the standards board. We got to bounce questions off Bjarne Stroustrup. Was pretty cool.
