Ok, I'll admit that I have quite a few problems with what is here, both for the business end and the engineering end, but I'll just name my two biggest here. 1

Ok, I'll admit that I have quite a few problems with what is here, both for the business end and the engineering end, but I'll just name my two biggest here. 1. While nothing on this outline strikes me as outrageous in terms of time, looking closely will uncover a huge amount of resources and time that is required on behalf of the student. Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves here. Learning programming for the first time in any language isn't something you can write off as easy or quick. I have attended courses that wanted to teach a language from start to competent, and they ran three months with 24 hours per week devoted for learning the syntax and application. This didn't include any data structures, algorithms, math, or other CS fundamentals [1]. Even then classmates struggled. I led several study sessions to help people with thorny concepts. All of this just to learn the basics of one language for the first time. In addition to all this learning, you need something to apply it (More on this below). This requires blocks of markedly non-trivial amount of time. You will be stretching your brain to try to fit what you learned to the problem you are having at any given moment, as well as the bigger task you want to accomplish. This is where you start to grok what you learned. Granted this isn't impossible, but with everything else people have to do in life it seems very strenuous. People need downtime to let their brain relax. Since there is a mentor involved, I am assuming that there is some sort of rubric they are applying, thus none of what is mentioned here can be considered as a pleasurable activity. This is work, no matter how much fun you have doing it. There's also the issue of part time work. Those business books and Treehouse accounts don't pay for themselves. You still need a place to live, to eat, and some spending money outside of the necessities. None of this stuff is free. There might be somebody who is paying for all that for you, but many do not have that luxury. Part time minimum wage work of 20 hours is seriously stretched for room and board expenses, much less course textbooks and pocket change. [2] Let's look at the time breakdown of one week. We have: 25 hours to learning programming. Includes coursework and project time. 12 hours for business books and blogging. 2 hours a day (5 days) reading and taking notes, and 1 hour per blog post. 2 hours for the other book. 1 hour with the mentor. 4 hours volunteering. 3 hours of exercise. 2 hours meeting somebody. Subtotal: 49 hours per week. 20 optional (maybe...) hours for work. Total: 69 hours per week. That's just the requirements for the first year. I haven't looked into what it would take for the door-to-door sales in year 2, the white paper in year 3, or learning a language and travel in year 4. 2. I am going to assume four months (16 weeks) of vacation per year for things such as Christmas and Summer break. That might be generous, so hear me out. That leaves 38 weeks of learning under these courses. That translates to about 38 business books and 8 outside books per year. Thus you will have read 114 business books and 32 outside books over the course of the four years with a grand total of 146 books. A student would chew through your list [3] before finishing his first year. I'm not counting any technical books they will go through [4]. How much of that can you realistically expect to remember? What is preventing this student from learning the material, especially the business books, enough to write about it in their blog post and then forgetting it? How much of any education is remembered beyond the test? What I see here is a lot (and I really mean a lot) of information absorption without any focus on how to cultivate retention. To force the long term storage of information would mean free-form projects where the student must apply the information they learned. While the technical end might accomplish this some through posting code to Github, simply doing tutorials won't force your head to remember what you learned. Even the project, scratching that itch, will not be enough. CompSci has several unsexy topics that a student would need to learn [5]. This is even worse for the business book section, where application is very hard to do in a traditional MBA learning environment. Some people are very good at retaining arbitrary information for long periods of time and others are not. What will be remembered is a four year long blur of reading, writing, and some code, but the student will be hard pressed to do any effective recall of what they learned. --- [1]: Don't underestimate CS fundumentals. Algorithms and their analysis and data structures are very important to understand. You might never write one yourself, but I guarantee you will use them. Honestly, where is the math in all of this study? [2]: I'm assuming this is geared for the typical college demographic, thus the 18-22 bracket. Unless you are extremely talented/gifted, you will be working minimum wage. That's around $8/hour for 20 hours, so you will pocket $640 a month. [3]: I don't see Peopleware on that list. Now I'm very suspicious... [4]: Unless they are taking the MIT/Stanford/etc courses, I haven't seen a good comprehensive CS course online. Most focus exclusively on a particular tech, like Rails or Javascript, and eschew the general CS coursework. I would love to be proved wrong though. [5]: Granted you can skip some fundamentals, there are others should not. Security and Cryptography come to mind as something most CS students do not want to dive into, but are VERY necessary for any web service. This post ballooned into something much larger than what I envisioned...