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Ask HN: I just don't care anymore. Any advice?
I've recently realized that college is killing my desire to do anything programming related. However, as I'm a full-time student without a job, dropping out and not working at Burger King boils down to getting lucky (although I've had a few headhunters call me, so maybe that's a start).
The reason I'm so underwhelmed is that in highschool, I really took off with a passion for computer programming. By my senior year, I was fairly fluent in Python and PHP, and I was spending time reading and working my hardest to finish the exercises in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. In addition to that, I started working (and have kept on working) at mastering C, Common Lisp and Haskell. It was somewhere between starting to read "Godel, Escher, Bach" and learning the basics of the theory of computation that I also fell in love with mathematics. I was pretty apathetic towards everything related to highschool, but I could take AP classes and get an 'A' with no effort while spending the rest of my time studying things I cared about, so it didn't seem all that bad. When applying to college, I had scores to get into/get noticed by a couple of nice-to-decent range schools (Columbia, RIT, Rose Hulman; my GPA/scores were consistent with the bar for Duke, CMU and others). The problem is, while I had put in minimal effort to get a really high GPA and nice test scores, I wasn't the minority captain of the football YMCA church team thing, so I didn't really stand a chance of getting scholarships at nicer schools. Since I have to pay for everything myself, I decided to enroll at the state university which gave me a nice chunk of cash to attend. Problem solved, right?
Fast forward to college, where my first programming class considers 'for' looping and arrays to be advanced techniques, and where showing that you know more than what is taught is actually considered cheating, and I'm burnt after the first semester. The thing is, there are so many things that I don't know (and so many of them are things that I want to learn), so the idea of just 'dropping out' is absurd, since I'm sure there are people here who can help me learn the material even better than if I was doing it on my own. At the same time, every class is a boring trudge that promises me that it's the last boring class I'll have to take and then it'll all be exciting from here and blah blah blah blah. The litmus test I used recently was "If I didn't have a scholarship, would I pay to take this class?" I realized that I probably would not pay for a single CS class offered here. I made it through last semester fairly unscathed, but this time around I feel an extreme apathy setting in. My grades are just at the beginning point of slipping - they're not quite terrible, but they're not the high 'A's I'm used to. This is purely due to my lack of interest.
What should I do? Should I just drop out? That seems like a bad idea, since at this point I know enough to know I don't know that much at all. Should I switch to something non-CS, and then just study CS on my own while occasionally popping in and picking the brains of the faculty? I'm sure some of you who've been through this exact dilemma are scoffing at me not finding the obvious answer myself through "soul-searching", but I really haven't found anyone who feels the same way I do to discuss this with. I've gone for too long without asking for help or advice.
- patio11 17y agoIf you're underchallenged, dropping out will make you underchallenged and unemployed with no prospects of securing gainful employment in the immediate future. People who are both better credentialed and better skilled then you are also looking for work right now. You do not want to compete against them on the basis of "I was something of a PHP hotshot in high school." Your classes are not the only avenue you have in life. Phone it in for the CS classes if you have to. (I did that for I think the first two years of my undergraduate degree, because even at a quite good school that was mostly "We'll teach you Java syntax! This is how you do a variable assignment! Study that for the next week and we'll do complicated stuff like doing two variable assignments!") If there is nothing in the department worth studying (which I kind of doubt), transfer to a better school and apply for loans. You're probably a good candidate for a double major in CS and a field which will teach you something useful. This is a good strategy for future employment prospects and, trust me, you can find something interesting and challenging. I did Japanese and it changed my life. Your college classes are not your sole outlet for personal growth, by the way. Society has agreed to give you 21 hours a day, five days a week, for the next three or four years, free of any expectation that you have to show up anywhere and put in eight hours of work. Use that time well. Think you know programming? Build stuff. You'll find out how much you have yet to learn.
- iQuit 17y ago>"I was something of a PHP hotshot in high school." That's not at all what I mean to imply. I wasn't trying to come across as "I'm cocky because I know a few things" so much as "I'm depressed because I'm learning even less than what little I learned on my own in highschool" >"We'll teach you Java syntax! This is how you do a variable assignment! Study that for the next week and we'll do complicated stuff like doing two variable assignments!" Exactly. >You're probably a good candidate for a double major in CS and a field which will teach you something useful. This is a good strategy for future employment prospects and, trust me, you can find something interesting and challenging. I did Japanese and it changed my life. I've already started on that route. >Think you know programming? Build stuff. You'll find out how much you have yet to learn. I agree completely with you on this. After doing so, I really do realize my limitations, and I know that there is so much more I have to learn. It's just that to learn anything in any useful depth requires mostly self-study (since school is slowly-paced and bent towards getting you a low-rung C++ job when you graduate), which I enjoy more anyway. But when you realize that, you wonder what the courses are there for.