In my opinion, the computer scientist is focused more on the academic and completes his work in the form of a paper. On the other hand, the programmer actually builds a product that is intended to be used. They ignore this distinction at my school (UMass Boston). The general consensus seems to be that programming is a lowly task.
Perhaps your experiences are different, but at the end of the day there is a sharp conflict of interest between the computer scientist and the programmer. Both want to solve problems, but the computer scientist seems more interested in some math problem and the programmer is more interested in building cool shit.
Computer science is as much about analyzing the properties of computation as it is about writing programs. Graph theory, computational complexity, data structures and algorithm design and analysis, etc. are all computer science topics.
> go to DeVry, or read some O'Reilly books
> and hack away. Your career will be mercifully
> short and uneventful.
What a condescending thing to say.
I went to art school.
My career has been going strong for 15+ years.