A few years ago I did the rounds of a bunch of schools in the Bay Area giving talks to CS departments. By far the most passionate students and the smartest ques

A few years ago I did the rounds of a bunch of schools in the Bay Area giving talks to CS departments. By far the most passionate students and the smartest questions came from a community college I spoke at in the East Bay. They had so many questions that the planned 1 hour talk ended up taking 2 hours, and nobody left even though it was the end of the day. They had also set up their own after hours meet-ups to teach themselves parallel programming. It helped that their teacher was highly inspiring and passionate too. In contrast, the university students just felt a lot less interested, and in one case they had to be promised credits just to get them to show up.