I'm in the middle of taking the undergrad PL class at the University of Washington and I've come to the conclusion that classes of this sort can be whatever you

I'm in the middle of taking the undergrad PL class at the University of Washington and I've come to the conclusion that classes of this sort can be whatever you make them. We spent the first five weeks learning/using ML, recently switched to Scheme, and will dive into Ruby for a few weeks before the quarter ends. While I'm sure many of my peers will leave the course thinking of functional languages as a quirky set of under-developed relatives to the tried-and-true OO family, I've spent the last 6 weeks breathing functional programming, both in my coursework and in places like this thread. I feel that I'm taking more away from the class and that much of introductory computer science works this way. The burden of learning is on the student to become engaged in the subject matter and make use of the resources the school and professor provides. At the end of the day, the department won't make the student great. To a degree, a driven and talented student can succeed anywhere, regardless of how many ooh's and aah's a name-dropping of their school will produce.