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You know what you can do as a university student in a technical discipline which can't really be done for free searching the internet? Participate in real rese

by abeppu 17y ago

You know what you can do as a university student in a technical discipline which can't really be done for free searching the internet? Participate in real research, guided and mentored by real-life scientists. Do lab-based classes. Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours. Yeah, if you only want to try to absorb the material in a totally passive way, and if you would never speak up in class, then you might as well just watch video lectures on-line and read the books and do stuff on your own. But if you choose to really take advantage of the university environment, you get a lot more than just the facts presented in the courses. I'm sure it's possible to have a career with just your own experiences and self-study. But I don't think you should be so sure you're better off than a peer who got their degree and all the various experiences that can come with it. By the way, I'm not sure whether you think it's the norm for engineers to not have formal training. Of the seven engineers on my team, all have at least an undergrad degree in CS or a related field, 3 have PhDs and 1 has a Masters.

blasdel 17y ago
What I did as an CS Undergraduate is teach CS classes to other undergraduates. When I first did it as a sophomore I got credit for developing the labwork & teaching it for 10 weeks, and got paid as a TA to grade what I assigned. My ~25 students were my classmates in the other sections of the full-time course. My Junior year I got credit for teaching a 10-week FPGA tutorial to a group of 5 students that were doing it as the 'project' portion of their CS course. My Senior year I informally helped my professor/coworker develop the robotics portion of a non-CS class I was taking, and tutored the other students.
- dsspence 17y ago
  ^copy and pasted from resume
flogic 17y ago
Provided you don't go to a crap school. If you go to a crap school... well... you're on your own.
marshallp 17y ago
"""Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours.""" You can do that on the internet, on sites like this and a million others, and probably in a better way - you have hundreds of people poring over and finding obvious flaws in your thinking rather than the handful you can have in a physical space. """Participate in real research, guided and mentored by real-life scientists. Do lab-based classes.""" That can easily be done outside of a university, at an industrial or government lab, the entire "non-research" infrastructure built around university labs is unnecessary for that.

by abeppu 17y ago

blasdel 17y ago

What I did as an CS Undergraduate is teach CS classes to other undergraduates. When I first did it as a sophomore I got credit for developing the labwork & teaching it for 10 weeks, and got paid as a TA to grade what I assigned. My ~25 students were my classmates in the other sections of the full-time course. My Junior year I got credit for teaching a 10-week FPGA tutorial to a group of 5 students that were doing it as the 'project' portion of their CS course. My Senior year I informally helped my professor/coworker develop the robotics portion of a non-CS class I was taking, and tutored the other students.

dsspence 17y ago
^copy and pasted from resume

flogic 17y ago

Provided you don't go to a crap school. If you go to a crap school... well... you're on your own.

marshallp 17y ago

"""Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours.""" You can do that on the internet, on sites like this and a million others, and probably in a better way - you have hundreds of people poring over and finding obvious flaws in your thinking rather than the handful you can have in a physical space. """Participate in real research, guided and mentored by real-life scientists. Do lab-based classes.""" That can easily be done outside of a university, at an industrial or government lab, the entire "non-research" infrastructure built around university labs is unnecessary for that.