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You have such an idyllic view of the college environment. My experience was struggling to motivate my teammates to do anything beyond the minimum, and an endles

You have such an idyllic view of the college environment. My experience was struggling to motivate my teammates to do anything beyond the minimum, and an endless barrage of "will this be on the exam?" questions during class. Looking back it's no wonder I am a self-learner now.

josephg 3y ago
Not all colleges are the same. I had a fantastic time at my college. For example, in our algorithms course, we needed to implement a lot of small algorithms for various things in Java. (Eg A-star, quicksort, etc). For each algorithm, we were provided a standard API to implement against so they could use automated marking. Well, me and some friends made our own benchmarking harness and web frontend around that api. Before the assignment was due, we would all upload our .class files (and upload test cases), and compete to see who wrote the fastest code. I think I learned at least as much from doing that as I did from the algorithms course itself. We didn’t have that much fun in all of our classes. But I cherish a lot of memories from that time in my life. I’m really glad I went to college and wouldn’t trade it for anything.
bruce511 3y ago
I guess less idyllic view, and more idyllic experience. I was fortunate to find like-minded folk in my class, and fortunate enough to have faculty that allowed us mere undergrads access to equipment "beyond our pay grade". Obviously the bulk of the class was there to pass, maybe 10% of us pushed the limits, learning the craft beyond the carricilum. We were probably 10 folk or so from a class of over 100. It was perhaps easier in my day - we had labs with machines no person owned. So you could spend time in the lab beyond the necessary, and the others would be there too. I imagine today there's less shared working space like that, but hopefully there are still ways to find like-minded souls. Self learning is great, and we all do that a lot now, but I've been fortunate to find others in my work community who still enjoy sharing, learning, and teaching. Its a bit less lonely that way, and none of us have all the answers.
bombolo 3y ago
In my BS I had just 1 team project, so it wasn't a big deal. In my master I had more… and yes there were people who didn't do anything, people who did much more than me, people who were good at writing reports but needed intervention because ultimately they didn't even understand what our project was about. I asked the professor once to dump a guy, because he said we should meet on a sunday morning to do our assignment, then he showed up 2 hours late, I was almost done with it, and he started by reading the 1st slide of the 1st lecture (with the name of the course, the email of the professor and so on).
c_crank 3y ago
The best college course coding projects are the solo ones. I consider myself fortunate to have gone to a school where 95% of the code projects were solo (and about half of them were in C, too!).

josephg 3y ago

Not all colleges are the same. I had a fantastic time at my college. For example, in our algorithms course, we needed to implement a lot of small algorithms for various things in Java. (Eg A-star, quicksort, etc). For each algorithm, we were provided a standard API to implement against so they could use automated marking. Well, me and some friends made our own benchmarking harness and web frontend around that api. Before the assignment was due, we would all upload our .class files (and upload test cases), and compete to see who wrote the fastest code. I think I learned at least as much from doing that as I did from the algorithms course itself. We didn’t have that much fun in all of our classes. But I cherish a lot of memories from that time in my life. I’m really glad I went to college and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

bruce511 3y ago

I guess less idyllic view, and more idyllic experience. I was fortunate to find like-minded folk in my class, and fortunate enough to have faculty that allowed us mere undergrads access to equipment "beyond our pay grade". Obviously the bulk of the class was there to pass, maybe 10% of us pushed the limits, learning the craft beyond the carricilum. We were probably 10 folk or so from a class of over 100. It was perhaps easier in my day - we had labs with machines no person owned. So you could spend time in the lab beyond the necessary, and the others would be there too. I imagine today there's less shared working space like that, but hopefully there are still ways to find like-minded souls. Self learning is great, and we all do that a lot now, but I've been fortunate to find others in my work community who still enjoy sharing, learning, and teaching. Its a bit less lonely that way, and none of us have all the answers.

bombolo 3y ago

In my BS I had just 1 team project, so it wasn't a big deal. In my master I had more… and yes there were people who didn't do anything, people who did much more than me, people who were good at writing reports but needed intervention because ultimately they didn't even understand what our project was about. I asked the professor once to dump a guy, because he said we should meet on a sunday morning to do our assignment, then he showed up 2 hours late, I was almost done with it, and he started by reading the 1st slide of the 1st lecture (with the name of the course, the email of the professor and so on).

c_crank 3y ago

The best college course coding projects are the solo ones. I consider myself fortunate to have gone to a school where 95% of the code projects were solo (and about half of them were in C, too!).