“I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.” I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in colle

“I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.” I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in college, so I certainly don’t intend to disparage science majors, but I have a vague sense that attitudes about engineering degrees are different nowadays. Out of interest I recently sat in on a graduate class which was supposed to be about complexity theory. On the first day the professor, who is an expert in the field, essentially told us “Complexity theory is trivial, you have a problem and you reduce it to another problem with an algorithm. Now, let me tell you what you have to do to get a software job at Amazon... You have to submit a paper every other semester to such and such conference etc...” Whereas I wanted to read through the Knuth books, and learn compiler theory, and learn category theory and algebraic geometry etc..., but the climate didn’t seem to support that; outside of a small group of friends I found (and the math graduate students). The climate felt like what this guy’s YouTube channel projects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=27C-TuJceeI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=27C-TuJceeI My friends at a different major public technical university bragged about attending career fairs and studying for coding interviews. It just feels almost devoid of what I imagined the academic spirit to be.