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by leovander 1990 days ago
It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers

My wife (lawyer) did the first three classes and the first two assignments. I watched along and was waiting for the same thing. She had some fun doing binary and playing around in scratch, and quickly lost interest as we didn't see where the legal part came in. We assumed it was the same course all the other CS50 variants were following and maybe there would be a legal bit at the end.

2 comments

If there's anything in that course that would be directly valuable for lawyers, I think it would be version control systems (assuming they cover it.) I don't know how much legal literature exists in this form today, but I imagine all laws and court decisions will migrate to such systems for the ease of access.
Again we stopped taking the course because it just didn’t seem relevant enough for her line of work, but another lawyer friend of ours could definitely use a legal oriented “what is version control/source code/package/importing/forking/branching” course.
My electrical engineering students, too, get bored when my differential equations course does not talk about circuits in any significant way.

Why do people not realize that skills and knowledge gained in one course will be used in specialized ways in another course? And they don't know enough just yet, to realize that specific topics chosen in the first course have been chosen with the intent of helping them do well in the second course?

They are right to be frustrated about not seeing the abstract material connected to concrete applications if your course's title is "Differential Equations for Electrical Engineers."