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I went to Oxford. I studied Physics. Yes, I learned to "wing it". If you can maneuver your way through a "tutorial" (2 students, one tutor) where the person eva
by swombat 16y ago
I went to Oxford. I studied Physics. Yes, I learned to "wing it". If you can maneuver your way through a "tutorial" (2 students, one tutor) where the person evaluating you is one of the smartest people in the world and an expert with 40 years more experience than you, and you're hungover and didn't really study the material properly, and still come out looking ok, you can deal with almost any situation where you need to "wing it" in the future. It's solid training.
That said, most of those students were very, very, very smart. To me, Oxford was the place where I went from finding it fairly easy to get whatever grades I wanted to struggling and working hard to get the minimum I found acceptable (a 2:1, or Upper Second, result in the overall degree). That was because the final grades were all relative, and there were a lot of very, very smart students I was competing against.
And, as far as the subject studied is concerned, don't forget that in the UK people rarely go on to work in the subject they studied. Sure, it's still better to do hard sciences, but apart from lawyers and doctors, most people end up doing something else after university.
Which is fine, imho - university is not and should not be training for a job, but, instead, training for life. And as far as life is concerned, in the world as it is today, winging it is certainly a more valuable skill than quantum mechanics.
- regomodo 16y agoSmall case-study I know but I work with somebody who just came out of Cambridge and did a CS-like degree. He cannot program for shit and talks like he does but show him a bit of C(++), PHP, javascript (even bash or Python) and his eyes just glaze over. I was teamed with him but he was forever unable to get anything done. In the end I was left with it all and made much better progress and he was left to book to overheads. I'm certain he's an edge case though, I've met a few others who went to Oxbridge and they are definitely on the ball. However, I've found those who went to Bristol, Imperial or Loughborough are people that are the smartest.
- swombat 16y agoThat's not a case study, just an anecdote. In my experience, there were almost no people in Oxford that I wouldn't consider "very smart". Probably the only place in the world where that's been true. That said, I don't know how Cambridge's "CS-like" degree is/was, but Oxford's was very bad at actually teaching programming. Then again, are you really sure he went to Cambridge? Smart people have no problem with learning to program when they need to. That guy doesn't sound so smart...
- regomodo 16y agoYeah, anecdote is the correct term. He definitely went to Cambridge which is why we questioned his choice of employer (the hirers decision). It doesn't matter what language he's given a task in others are always curious as to why he's taking so long or when it's ever going to be done. It's not like he's making a cathedral of every task as ctrl+c & ctr+v are his key tools along with a good smattering of ugly hacks(i get the feeling he has no grasp of OOP or VCS). He's comfortable in Access though.
- AlisdairO 16y agoThat's not really all that surprising - Cambridge's CS course is highly theoretical, and very grounded in mathematics. It doesn't really train programmers as such. I decided before going to uni that I wanted a more practical degree, but I think it's important for some universities to teach pure computer science as opposed to a programming/cs mix.