6 ms·

- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+ At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the

by xyzzyz 8y ago

- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+ At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own. The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. Thus, don’t give up, the paper certifying it is more important than the “education” you are getting.

BeetleB 8y ago
>The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's and a few had a PhD. Only one did not finish undergrad. I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent. I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work"). And the management doesn't care either (automating boring work will not help you in your career). I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter. Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role. I went to a low ranked undergrad and a top 5 grad school. My experience mirrors this person's if you substitute community college for undergrad and undergrad for grad. At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.
- lol768 8y ago
  >At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor. I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research? The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-results-teaching-excellence-framework https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.
  - foldr 8y ago
    >For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      And "of course", this is one argument not to go to a top ranked research university for undergrad. BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.
lordnacho 8y ago
> The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace Aren't you on holiday for a lot of those 4 years? I went to uni for 4 years, and it was 3 terms of 8 weeks each, per year. In other words, 96 weeks. Throw in the occasional rest week and it should really fit in two years.
- telchar 8y ago
  What part of the world is that? In the US it's typical to have 2 16-18 week semesters per year, usually with a job or internship for 10-12 weeks in the summer.
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.
    - telchar 8y ago
      That squares with what I have heard before about UK university degrees being shorter than US degrees. What do you do with the rest of the year?
      - lordnacho 8y ago
        Internships. Or work, or study. Up to you. You have an informal exam when you get back and if you annoy the profs enough they'll kick you out for failing it. But that's pretty rare.
      - laurencerowe 8y ago
        Time spent per year is roughly equivalent. UK degrees are shorter than US degrees because we spend only three years at university for a bachelors degree. Depth is similar but there's less breadth - we only study our major, so as a CS student all my classes were taught by the CS department apart from a handful of math classes.
  - 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
If you take a full load of summer classes you can get a four year undergraduate degree done in 2-ish years.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  Not if you care what classes you take. Lots (most?) of the higher level year 3/4 courses are not taught in the summer in my experience (three different unis and i did my masters course work year round). You can pick up the more generic courses or a breadth requirement though.
munchbunny 8y ago
That really depends. If you're just trying to get trained for a vocation, then yeah, you don't need 4 years. However, I do think a 4-year degree is a unique opportunity, and it shouldn't be seen as a screen for people who can slog so much as a fit question of "do you need the other things that come with a 4-year degree?" I'd guess that a bit less than half of my 4 years was spent on academics, of which it was 2/3 CS degree and 1/3 liberal arts. The rest was summer internships, hobbies, personal projects, engineering teams, research, and just playing around as an 18-22 year old. I agree with the parent poster's advice though. Outside of my academics, I learned skills like writing, speaking, organizing, diplomacy, etc. which you often learn anyway through work experience. People returning to school need that much less than people who never worked do, so there's no need for them to pay the time tax on extracurriculars.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The 4 years is supposed to change the way you look at the world, on an unconscious level. I've found that every major personal change I've gone through - college, entering a career, moving cross-country, working at Google, being an entrepreneur, and even my relationship with my wife - took about 4-5 years before I was really comfortable on a gut level with my new life and could accept it as part of my identity. The actual technical material takes much less time to master - I found I was pretty competent at Javascript after 6 months, I could make major changes to Google at a year, I knew where most of the important things in the Bay Area were within a year, etc. But that's not really the point. The point is that when you go about your daily life, without thinking too much, have you internalized the value system and worldview that you're being educated into? It's the transition into unconscious competence. Now, whether the university system teaches a worldview that correlates well with what you need for success in the rest of the world is another question. Just a couple months ago, the President of the U.S. was tweetstorming about academic brainwashing in universities. And depending how you squint, that may even be accurate - a worldview looks like brainwashing to people outside of that worldview. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in positions of wealth and power have been through those 4 years and have adopted that worldview, and doing so yourself will significantly reduce the friction as you interact with them.

by xyzzyz 8y ago

BeetleB 8y ago

>The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's and a few had a PhD. Only one did not finish undergrad. I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent. I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work"). And the management doesn't care either (automating boring work will not help you in your career). I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter. Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role. I went to a low ranked undergrad and a top 5 grad school. My experience mirrors this person's if you substitute community college for undergrad and undergrad for grad. At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.

lol768 8y ago
>At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor. I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research? The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-results-teaching-excellence-framework https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.
- foldr 8y ago
  >For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    And "of course", this is one argument not to go to a top ranked research university for undergrad. BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.

lordnacho 8y ago

> The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace Aren't you on holiday for a lot of those 4 years? I went to uni for 4 years, and it was 3 terms of 8 weeks each, per year. In other words, 96 weeks. Throw in the occasional rest week and it should really fit in two years.

telchar 8y ago
What part of the world is that? In the US it's typical to have 2 16-18 week semesters per year, usually with a job or internship for 10-12 weeks in the summer.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.
  - telchar 8y ago
    That squares with what I have heard before about UK university degrees being shorter than US degrees. What do you do with the rest of the year?
    - lordnacho 8y ago
      Internships. Or work, or study. Up to you. You have an informal exam when you get back and if you annoy the profs enough they'll kick you out for failing it. But that's pretty rare.
    - laurencerowe 8y ago
      Time spent per year is roughly equivalent. UK degrees are shorter than US degrees because we spend only three years at university for a bachelors degree. Depth is similar but there's less breadth - we only study our major, so as a CS student all my classes were taught by the CS department apart from a handful of math classes.
- 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

If you take a full load of summer classes you can get a four year undergraduate degree done in 2-ish years.

fhbdukfrh 8y ago
Not if you care what classes you take. Lots (most?) of the higher level year 3/4 courses are not taught in the summer in my experience (three different unis and i did my masters course work year round). You can pick up the more generic courses or a breadth requirement though.

munchbunny 8y ago

That really depends. If you're just trying to get trained for a vocation, then yeah, you don't need 4 years. However, I do think a 4-year degree is a unique opportunity, and it shouldn't be seen as a screen for people who can slog so much as a fit question of "do you need the other things that come with a 4-year degree?" I'd guess that a bit less than half of my 4 years was spent on academics, of which it was 2/3 CS degree and 1/3 liberal arts. The rest was summer internships, hobbies, personal projects, engineering teams, research, and just playing around as an 18-22 year old. I agree with the parent poster's advice though. Outside of my academics, I learned skills like writing, speaking, organizing, diplomacy, etc. which you often learn anyway through work experience. People returning to school need that much less than people who never worked do, so there's no need for them to pay the time tax on extracurriculars.

nostrademons 8y ago
The 4 years is supposed to change the way you look at the world, on an unconscious level. I've found that every major personal change I've gone through - college, entering a career, moving cross-country, working at Google, being an entrepreneur, and even my relationship with my wife - took about 4-5 years before I was really comfortable on a gut level with my new life and could accept it as part of my identity. The actual technical material takes much less time to master - I found I was pretty competent at Javascript after 6 months, I could make major changes to Google at a year, I knew where most of the important things in the Bay Area were within a year, etc. But that's not really the point. The point is that when you go about your daily life, without thinking too much, have you internalized the value system and worldview that you're being educated into? It's the transition into unconscious competence. Now, whether the university system teaches a worldview that correlates well with what you need for success in the rest of the world is another question. Just a couple months ago, the President of the U.S. was tweetstorming about academic brainwashing in universities. And depending how you squint, that may even be accurate - a worldview looks like brainwashing to people outside of that worldview. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in positions of wealth and power have been through those 4 years and have adopted that worldview, and doing so yourself will significantly reduce the friction as you interact with them.