How can we best inform potential students of the nature of CS? Recent questions deal with the problem of too many applicants to CS programs, both in High School and University. Yes, this is a problem when only a smaller number can be accommodated for reasons of resource availability. One of the easier issues to deal with is whether the student's past performance indicates potential success, though even this is hard. If the student hasn't studied Computer Science in the past, what courses are predictors? But this question is focused elsewhere. 

Some students, in periods of high demand, choose a field simply because of its popularity at the time. While they may have the aptitude and background for it, their interest may be shallow or even misinformed. It would be good to help such students make better choices about their futures by informing them early of the nature of the field and how their future would likely play out if they stay in the field. The goal is to reduce the number of drop-outs: students who start a program, but leave it before completion. This potentially wastes both the student's time and resources as well as wasting institutional resources. It also risks denying other students an entrance slot that they might have had. 

In particular, such students may not know all of the things that CS professionals do on a daily basis. What are the interesting things? What are the boring things? What are the risks? What are the rewards? What frustrations? What will they ultimately need to do to become successful, in either the commercial or academic worlds. 

What resources can be brought to bear to assure that, possibly naive, students get a good look at the profession so as to better decide whether they want to enter?

Google provides a lot of information for "What is Computer Science?" This includes the summaries given by a lot of colleges. However, most of it stresses only the positive things and so gives a somewhat incomplete picture.

In the early 1960's as a teenager, I visited a local computer center. They had what was likely an IBM 650 with drum memory. I got to see what folks did back then and recall that I wasn't very impressed. I studied math. But CS wasn't an option then. But something more was needed in my case to generate interest.  



For the record, I'm interested in drawing an accurate picture of work in the field, not horror stories or overly optimistic projections.
If the main issue is that the not-so-great side of programming (to pick one area as an example) is not disclosed, then tell people point-blank, in an admission conversation or while describing programming to groups:


  Programming is one of the most frustrating and difficult things that
  humans have ever devised to do.


I say that to all my students right out, usually the first day. I also tell them about the big egg-shaped rock I used to wave threateningly at the (glass CRT) screen when I got particularly frustrated. And I tell them about the time I had to go back to the bookstore to buy a different book about the intricacies of writing DOS interrupt routines for networking with IPX over Novell: the first book had a missing line in a code example.

It certainly is true that one can succeed with poor background and preparation. I hated math classes, and they probably would have helped me become better faster at programming (my first chosen career that I attended college to get to). There is no substitute for being really interested in something, interested enough to defy your parents and change your major in college, interested enough to press on through many difficulties, come what may. "Being carried along is not enough."

Loving it even when you don't really know what it is will work, I do not know what else will. As it says about qualifications in the book At the Feet of the Master:


  Love, if it is strong enough in a man, will force him to acquire all
  of the other qualifications, and all the rest without it would never be
  sufficient.


We are supposed to do what we love. Freud said that the keys to a meaningful life are Work and Love. Really, they are one.