3 ms·

A common thread in these endless discussions is what a shallow and reductive view the pro-dropout people have of university. This guy thinks the biggest dig aga

A common thread in these endless discussions is what a shallow and reductive view the pro-dropout people have of university. This guy thinks the biggest dig against McGill is that they teach web development (!) with an old stack, and he "knows" that he can "replicate everything that college can give and hopefully more". I hope Facebook can pay this kid in Dunning-Krugerrands. What a lot of early dropouts don't seem to realize is that the normal university experience in is very tail-loaded towards the tough, interesting courses. You can blitz through a couple years of basics and fume about how slow stuff is, or that the Intro Programming is in the "Wrong Language (TM)", but most of what I remember being good were 300- and 400-level courses. As you specialize, you also pick up a lot of these courses, relatively speaking. There's also a lot to be said for, I dunno, all the other courses that you could be doing at a university for intellectual breadth. It's not a vocational school. Oh well, he has a starter job at a tech company, which will probably be for life. That's how that works, right?

sberens 5y ago
Man, nobody gives people the benefit of the doubt on the internet huh :( Sorry if my comment on PHP was in poor taste, but it was more of an easy rag than the crux of my argument. I do standby that most CS courses that are supposed to be "practical" teach outdated material (at least at McGill), but of course there are exceptions (e.g. I used ZooKeeper in my distributed systems course). I do think that I do a decent job in my essay explaining how I can fulfill the three reasons people go to college by myself, so I think that merits more of a response than a mocking quote (if I'm reading the tone right). For the record, I took several 500 level courses (along with 300-400 level courses) and although I did learn a good amount, I still think that my time would have been better spent elsewhere. Also for the record, I took several psychology and philosophy courses where I liked the content but felt the professors/TAs tried to shoehorn me into some method of thinking and take it out on my grades when they disagreed with my essays. I will gladly read the same content on my own time and discuss it with other interested people.

sberens 5y ago

Man, nobody gives people the benefit of the doubt on the internet huh :( Sorry if my comment on PHP was in poor taste, but it was more of an easy rag than the crux of my argument. I do standby that most CS courses that are supposed to be "practical" teach outdated material (at least at McGill), but of course there are exceptions (e.g. I used ZooKeeper in my distributed systems course). I do think that I do a decent job in my essay explaining how I can fulfill the three reasons people go to college by myself, so I think that merits more of a response than a mocking quote (if I'm reading the tone right). For the record, I took several 500 level courses (along with 300-400 level courses) and although I did learn a good amount, I still think that my time would have been better spent elsewhere. Also for the record, I took several psychology and philosophy courses where I liked the content but felt the professors/TAs tried to shoehorn me into some method of thinking and take it out on my grades when they disagreed with my essays. I will gladly read the same content on my own time and discuss it with other interested people.