Interesting how your higher education experience is different from mine. I went to ITMO (in St Petersburg) after graduating from school in 2010. The bachelor's/

Interesting how your higher education experience is different from mine. I went to ITMO (in St Petersburg) after graduating from school in 2010. The bachelor's/master's thing was new then and not all universities adopted it yet, our year was the last when they still did "specialists". My tuition was paid by the government. I passed university's own challenge thing to bypass the standard requirement of a rather high "unified government exam" (ЕГЭ) result. I already knew enough programming from building Flash apps and poking around with J2ME during high school and I got really bored, really fast, with all the kindergarten-level exercises and all the relentless bureaucracy. C programming professor insisted that assignments had to follow a strict template and be turned in as printed pages, for example. We had C, C++, and a bit of C#. The cryptography professor had us write crypto algorithms IN MATLAB OF ALL THINGS. There were also several course projects where you could choose your own stack, but again, they were uninteresting for me at my level. The databases (SQL only) and networking classes were the only ones where I actually learned something substantially new. Operating systems and Linux administration classes were also kinda useful because they helped me tie my understanding of these things together into a bigger picture. We did surprisingly little real programming. Philosophy almost got me expelled because that professor was a young girl that didn't allow anyone to even try to cheat and wanted you to retell books. That's it. No thinking required, read a book and store it in your head. I had to lie to multiple people to take the long-overdue exam with another professor that didn't care about students cheating. That was a recurring theme. There wasn't much interesting stuff, most was this "memory training". Memorize, regurgitate, get your passing grade, forget. This gave me unending trouble. There was even a system (ЦДО) where you would pass tests like these. I have a collection of most asinine questions somewhere. The same system was where our grades were stored. It also had internal mail. You could put HTML into messages. They tried to filter it, but I did manage to find a way to sneak an XSS in there, whoops. A stored XSS that you can send to anyone else who has access to this system! It involved some base64 trickery with <object> iirc. Never reported it. You could really tell this was a very Soviet curriculum they sprinkled with some occasional modern stuff. I got my real job at VKontakte as an Android developer at the beginning of my 2nd year. This is where I got most of my real programming experience. But either way, I'm officially an "information systems engineer".