3 ms·

One of the biggest drawbacks in the community college experience is the cohort. Not that it's any better at a lot of universities either, but the one thing I le

One of the biggest drawbacks in the community college experience is the cohort. Not that it's any better at a lot of universities either, but the one thing I learnt the most from in college was my peers. Some of the problems like poor course structure, aged curriculum, lack of effort from professors, repetition etc. exists even in top tier universities like Stanford or Berkeley. However, you get some of the smartest minds as your peers, TAs, dates or roommates. Not only do you learn through them in classes, homeworks, project groups etc., but a lot of them go out and work as interns in some of the biggest names in tech. They bring so much knowledge and exposure with them, you benefit from even the smallest of the interactions. The only reason I learnt about git and aliasing commands in shell was because I was sitting next to this kid who did his internship at a cool tech company after their freshman year.

Rapzid 5y ago
What's Git? I dropped out of community college.
- exolymph 5y ago
  cannot tell if serious, but here you go: https://git-scm.com/ https://git-scm.com/
kixiQu 5y ago
This was one of the things I loved about my community college / transfer-to-a-commuter-state-school experience: once you got through about a year of the program, 90% of the people left were pretty serious about improving their lives with their education. A lot of "nontraditional" students, older students, people with kids, etc. Yeah, it sucked that only a scant handful of people got internships with any prestige attached, but if you actually cared about learning from each other you got the opportunity to. (Even there, I learned a ton from the guy sitting next to me flexing his vim skills and shit-talking the databases professor -- there's always somebody!) For the vast majority of people, the alternative to that isn't Stanford -- it's some "traditional" four-year institution where a good portion of your classmates are really there to plagiarize and finesse some early-stage alcoholism. A lot of my community college classmates may not have been "the smartest minds", but having an environment where people cared was far better for my learning than the time at a private school I'd spent in courses full of hungover rich kids.

Rapzid 5y ago

What's Git? I dropped out of community college.

exolymph 5y ago
cannot tell if serious, but here you go: https://git-scm.com/ https://git-scm.com/

kixiQu 5y ago

This was one of the things I loved about my community college / transfer-to-a-commuter-state-school experience: once you got through about a year of the program, 90% of the people left were pretty serious about improving their lives with their education. A lot of "nontraditional" students, older students, people with kids, etc. Yeah, it sucked that only a scant handful of people got internships with any prestige attached, but if you actually cared about learning from each other you got the opportunity to. (Even there, I learned a ton from the guy sitting next to me flexing his vim skills and shit-talking the databases professor -- there's always somebody!) For the vast majority of people, the alternative to that isn't Stanford -- it's some "traditional" four-year institution where a good portion of your classmates are really there to plagiarize and finesse some early-stage alcoholism. A lot of my community college classmates may not have been "the smartest minds", but having an environment where people cared was far better for my learning than the time at a private school I'd spent in courses full of hungover rich kids.