8 ms·

What I Learned In College

118 points by blackhole 13y ago

blacksqr 13y ago
"Sometimes you have to consider the possibility they are getting the results they want." --Atrios
nickthemagicman 13y ago
Does the fact the his avatar is fluttershy kind of ruin his credibility to anyone else?
- chunky1994 13y ago
  Some of the smartest people I know watch MLP, so I would have to say no.
- msutherl 13y ago
  The fact that you know its name ruins your credibility.
  - wismer 13y ago
    He's got you there.
  - zanny 13y ago
    He got it wrong, that is an OC to my knowledge. None of the major main cast are male ponies, and that isn't one of the side characters I know of. So consider his credibility untarnished. ~credibility is for curmudgeons.
    - roryokane 13y ago
      I can confirm that his avatar is an original character. I don’t recognize it, having watched most of the show, and it’s not on http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies.
- 10098 13y ago
  It's not Fluttershy (and now I'm ashamed of myself for knowing that. I don't actually watch mlp, I swear).
switch33 13y ago
I've talked to Erik on a few occasions. And I think he is extremely bright and seeing someone pour over with enthusiasm like him is what motivates me to do better programming wise. In response here are a few things I think people should consider: It seems to me that the GPA requirements for computer science are being made pretty strict in response to trying to get the students to take other paths because some colleges don't want to have so many computer science major students. This seems like a problem because these colleges are not really adapting to the situation and are instead just trying to push students to other curriculum by making the grade requirements much stricter for certain majors. I think math in college is probably much better than it was in middleschool as well. I definitely agree I hated repeating multiplication tables and all that. It just was not fun. And it did not even feel like learning. I think there are many people who are interested in math and will not really know it till they read more about the different subjects that are in it. Theres no easy answers in education like there is no easy answers in government policy. It's just too much generalization that cannot be quantified. The abstraction in some college classes has gotten me a bit annoyed since the teachers almost do not consider the other students. One case is where I had a teacher who on the last day of class changed the main assignment of the whole class to be more clearly worded in a really bad way. He failed to provide adequate time for students mainly. On the last day of class he decided that students writing a group assignment should only hand in 1 group assignment (with no instruction about how one person can remove a copy of the assignment turned in through blackboard). When a group of 4 people has to coordinate anything in less than a single day it's an idiots game. My main compliant- This could have been much easier if he just graded the latest turned in papers. Or he graded the earliest ones. It wouldn't have mattered that much to some, but he really threw a bunch of his students under the bus for a grading policy that was rather unreasonable. Instead he decided to deduct 10% off that grade because of some rule he made up in the last day of a 6 week class that was unfair because he did not provide adequate instruction. Simple Game Theory will tell you something will go wrong in such a small time frame with no information. Unfortunately, my college was silly enough to not want to fix this huge blunder an professor made. In my honest opinion even the basics of game theory should be taught to teachers and people looking to go into politics. People need to understand there is a reasoning policy behind different actions. Even if it's a non-mathematical introduction to game-theory for the most part. People need to realize there are smarter ways of getting people motivated to do things which may be better than what they are thinking.
navait 13y ago
Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs. What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!" Get it out of your head that being smart entitles you to anything or makes you special. You'll find your classmates aren't robots, and are just as smart as you, and have a lot to offer.
- JMStewy 13y ago
  I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late. That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.
  - navait 13y ago
    I am a fresh graduate, and I came into university with the same attitude as him, in a scholarship program full of people with my attitude. Fortunately, the dean talked to my freshman class during orientation. He said: "Yes, you're smart. But you'll find here, everyone else is also smart. You'll find that you have to distinguish yourself through the work you do.". Admittedly, my ego was too big at the time to really take the thought seriously, but after meeting so many wonderful people at the university, and many people who were so ridiculously smarter than I was I realized how special I wasn't. For the most part, I found people who kept my attitude didn't fare as well as the students who did change. I also think posts like this ignore all the students who navigate the system successfully. It makes our universities seem as failures, when they provide so much value and sucesses.
    - zanny 13y ago
JMStewy 13y ago
OP, from your description of your relationship with math in school I think you would enjoy Lockhart's Lament (pdf warning): http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring and vindicating when I found it.
10098 13y ago
What you learn in college/university depends only on yourself. Tests are just the most convenient, unified way to measure students' progress. There are two ways you can beat tests: one is to train specifically for the test, the other is to actually know the subject. The first way is easier, but leaves you with little residual knowledge, and you don't even know how to apply that knowledge. The second way is much harder, and it requires work on your part. However, it pays off. Not only you get to pass the test, you're also now armed with useful knowledge. At my time in university, I've taken both approaches towards various subjects. For the algorithms class, I made a lot of effort to study and understand the subject. Today, I still have it in my head, and can apply it when needed. For differential equations, I just studied for the test. I don't remember anything now, and it's my fault for being lazy. I got an "A" in both subjects, by the way. What I'm trying to say is, the system is just fine as long as qualified professors are teaching. The problem is lazy students.
jmduke 13y ago
I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too. I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.) I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper. I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.) I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's outcomes. I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it. (I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  > I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I've had the same experience. And I hate how colleges seem not to recognize that.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    Something I realized around seven semesters too late is that most programs are conducive to independent studies, which is I'm sure a wildly broad term but at my alma mater it was basically "Go spend three months on your own learning something interesting and then write a paper or a powerpoint or a plugin on it." You'd have an advisor (or sometimes a board of advisors) to meet with you every few weeks, but the work was all entirely self-directed, sort of like a mini-honors thesis. I imagine that those are going to become increasingly popular. If you abstract it out, its basically a credential system for productive independent thought, which is sort of the whole point.
mjmahone17 13y ago
Holy crap, UW's CS only has 200 graduates per year? For a school of that size, that's tiny. That's close to as many as most Ivy League schools these days, and their undergrad population is usually around 1/5 that of UW. This is especially sad, as CS courses should be pretty easy to scale, especially when you have a group of undergrads who want to teach. Not to mention how hypercompetitiveness drives out diversity, especially of minds, because the more competitive it is, the more of the "correct" hoops you have to jump through. This means that, if you struggle in math but are highly artistic, and could bring a different perspective to your courses, you're effectively shut out.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Most CS departments are small, because the 101 courses usually have enormous dropout rates. People come in thinking: I'll write apps. I'll write computer games. I'll be like the cool hackers in the movies. I'll be a billionaire. About halfway through their first cryptic gcc error message, these students discover that their burning passion is really for Arts or Business or whathaveyou.
- nahname 13y ago
  650ish enrolled with me when I went to school. It was down to about 250 after the first year. By the third year, only 4 of the 30 or so people I hung around with were still at it. Of all my peer group, I'm the only one currently programming (one's a QA, rest went to sales). Programming is way harder to learn than any of us can remember.
- AlexanderMiller 13y ago
  I was an undergrad TA for the intro CSE classes at UW, and I was impressed by the way the courses were run and proud to be a part of it, so it hurts me to read comments like this. You're right, there is a large pool of undergrads who want to teach, and the department takes full advantage of that. Unlike every other department at UW (that I know of), CSE pays undergrads to teach section (20 student classes that supplement the main lectures). Around 50 to 80 undergrads teach every quarter. Furthermore, the instructors are insanely dedicated to diversity of minds. They constantly try to incorporate different ways of thinking into their courses to encourage students who might not be the math-y or computer-y types to understand their own potential. As evidence of this: the principal lecturer of the intro classes, Stuart Reges, gives keynote speeches at educational conferences on the success of the UW CSE program in attracting and retaining women in CSE. There is a huge amount of diversity among CSE majors -- double majors in art, business, math, linguistics, etc. The problem is funding. Even though there is a huge demand for CSE degrees, the department doesn't have enough money to provide them. There's talk now of implementing differential tuition at UW, meaning that majoring in a high-demand field will cost you more than majoring in a low-demand one. This might allow the CSE department to fulfill the demand, but who knows if it's really a good idea. Sorry for the long winded reply! Didn't mean for this to stretch out. I guess I took your comment a little too personally. :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dev1n 13y ago
The greatest challenge our species has ever faced is the educational system itself. Almost. John Steinbeck said it best, IMO, "We now face the danger which has been the most destructive to the humans. Success, comfort, and ever increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."
arikrak 13y ago
>Any task that can be reduced to simply following a set of instructions over and over is being done by robots and software. Agreed. Along similar lines: Any problem that can be solved with clearly-defined steps can be programmed so that a computer can solve it. Many areas of education, especially math-related ones, involve students learning to mechanically implement set procedures and formulas to solve problems. These mechanical processes can all by definition be solved by a computer, so why pretend that these technologies do not exist? Human computers were once necessary, but they have since been supplanted. http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84 http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Sometimes it takes hundreds of exposures to concrete examples to grasp the abstract principle. I'm sure we've all had a-ha! moments of the form "it's just like Professor Whatsisname / Coach Thingo / Mrs So-and-so said, I just didn't get it".
- sowhatquestion 13y ago
  I find it interesting there's one genre of indignant op-eds lamenting the death of creativity in education (including this one--not saying it's bad or formulaic, but it's definitely part of a genre).... and there's another genre lamenting that most college graduates are getting Starbucks barista type jobs that don't require creativity... Much scarier than the idea that the education system is failing, is the idea that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the increasingly meager role that our society assigns it. As OP points out, there isn't a textbook with the answers for meaningful real-world problems--but there is one that tells you precisely how many pumps of chocolate syrup go in a grande mocha. HN readers may be a priori more prepared to accept the watered-down version of this idea. "Of course the system needs creative problem solving, that's the most important part of my job!" If this describes you, congratulations, you are one of the priviliged few who has what the economist David Autor calls an "analytic" job. In fact, it's increasingly likely that the very purpose of your job is to ensure that there's no middle ground between you and those textbook-following Starbucks workers[1]. 1: http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-job-destroyer/ http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-jo...
techboots 13y ago
You learned how the real world works. It's inefficient, it's not fair, and it's corrupt.
AlexanderMiller 13y ago
How would you design the CSE admissions process? What would you change? Have you considered the pressure and lack of resources the admissions committee is forced to deal with? What about the students who received 4.0's in all intro math and computer science classes? Why should the department devote precious educational resources to you, rather than to them? We all wish that CSE was an open major at UW. But you're ignoring a huge amount of complex practical issues when you blame bureaucracy. You offer simplistic criticism but no solutions.
- blackhole 13y ago
  The CSE program does not use its funding very well. This is not something I claim, it's something a CSE professor told me when I pointed out various shortcomings, and he agreed with many of them but was not in a position to do anything about it. That said, the CSE program doesn't have enough funding in the first place, either. That's the primary issue.
calhoun137 13y ago
The most important thing I learned in college was how to learn things on my own.
alexgartrell 13y ago
It's really hard to not come across as ad hominem when you're disagreeing with OP's take on a personal experience, but I have very little patience for someone who sees or experiences something negative and does nothing more that cry into the wind. Fix the bug or find a work around. Lots of people managed to have great and very useful and applicable college experiences (I did) so maybe it's the OP who is wrong?
nnoitra 13y ago
It's about the environment and the people that surround you. It's not all about learning. It never was.
tehwalrus 13y ago
This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people (teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy. (even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.) I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots. Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.
azurelogic 13y ago
I had a very similar experience in undergrad. I skipped all sorts of classes and got great grades. I didn't care. I put off studying weeks of material until days before the exam. I'd even have a beer or 2 before exams. It wasn't stimulating. For me, part of that was because I was doing the wrong thing the whole time. I was studying biochem when I should have been learning to code. When I went back for my masters in CS, I actually tried and cared. I think I missed 3 classes the whole time and only because I was too sick to go. Passion for becoming the best programmer I could be drove me to try harder and harder. While I know that school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about software development, I refused to let anything that I could learn slip by.
cafard 13y ago
Useless facts are useless if not not organized (by the learner) into a useful structure. My impression is that a lot of schools have responded to this not by helping the students to organize the facts but by going light on facts instead.

118 points by blackhole 13y ago

blacksqr 13y ago

"Sometimes you have to consider the possibility they are getting the results they want." --Atrios

nickthemagicman 13y ago

Does the fact the his avatar is fluttershy kind of ruin his credibility to anyone else?

chunky1994 13y ago
Some of the smartest people I know watch MLP, so I would have to say no.
msutherl 13y ago
The fact that you know its name ruins your credibility.
- wismer 13y ago
  He's got you there.
- zanny 13y ago
  He got it wrong, that is an OC to my knowledge. None of the major main cast are male ponies, and that isn't one of the side characters I know of. So consider his credibility untarnished. ~credibility is for curmudgeons.
  - roryokane 13y ago
    I can confirm that his avatar is an original character. I don’t recognize it, having watched most of the show, and it’s not on http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies.
10098 13y ago
It's not Fluttershy (and now I'm ashamed of myself for knowing that. I don't actually watch mlp, I swear).

switch33 13y ago

I've talked to Erik on a few occasions. And I think he is extremely bright and seeing someone pour over with enthusiasm like him is what motivates me to do better programming wise. In response here are a few things I think people should consider: It seems to me that the GPA requirements for computer science are being made pretty strict in response to trying to get the students to take other paths because some colleges don't want to have so many computer science major students. This seems like a problem because these colleges are not really adapting to the situation and are instead just trying to push students to other curriculum by making the grade requirements much stricter for certain majors. I think math in college is probably much better than it was in middleschool as well. I definitely agree I hated repeating multiplication tables and all that. It just was not fun. And it did not even feel like learning. I think there are many people who are interested in math and will not really know it till they read more about the different subjects that are in it. Theres no easy answers in education like there is no easy answers in government policy. It's just too much generalization that cannot be quantified. The abstraction in some college classes has gotten me a bit annoyed since the teachers almost do not consider the other students. One case is where I had a teacher who on the last day of class changed the main assignment of the whole class to be more clearly worded in a really bad way. He failed to provide adequate time for students mainly. On the last day of class he decided that students writing a group assignment should only hand in 1 group assignment (with no instruction about how one person can remove a copy of the assignment turned in through blackboard). When a group of 4 people has to coordinate anything in less than a single day it's an idiots game. My main compliant- This could have been much easier if he just graded the latest turned in papers. Or he graded the earliest ones. It wouldn't have mattered that much to some, but he really threw a bunch of his students under the bus for a grading policy that was rather unreasonable. Instead he decided to deduct 10% off that grade because of some rule he made up in the last day of a 6 week class that was unfair because he did not provide adequate instruction. Simple Game Theory will tell you something will go wrong in such a small time frame with no information. Unfortunately, my college was silly enough to not want to fix this huge blunder an professor made. In my honest opinion even the basics of game theory should be taught to teachers and people looking to go into politics. People need to understand there is a reasoning policy behind different actions. Even if it's a non-mathematical introduction to game-theory for the most part. People need to realize there are smarter ways of getting people motivated to do things which may be better than what they are thinking.

navait 13y ago

Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs. What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!" Get it out of your head that being smart entitles you to anything or makes you special. You'll find your classmates aren't robots, and are just as smart as you, and have a lot to offer.

JMStewy 13y ago
I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late. That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.
- navait 13y ago
  I am a fresh graduate, and I came into university with the same attitude as him, in a scholarship program full of people with my attitude. Fortunately, the dean talked to my freshman class during orientation. He said: "Yes, you're smart. But you'll find here, everyone else is also smart. You'll find that you have to distinguish yourself through the work you do.". Admittedly, my ego was too big at the time to really take the thought seriously, but after meeting so many wonderful people at the university, and many people who were so ridiculously smarter than I was I realized how special I wasn't. For the most part, I found people who kept my attitude didn't fare as well as the students who did change. I also think posts like this ignore all the students who navigate the system successfully. It makes our universities seem as failures, when they provide so much value and sucesses.
  - zanny 13y ago

JMStewy 13y ago

OP, from your description of your relationship with math in school I think you would enjoy Lockhart's Lament (pdf warning): http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring and vindicating when I found it.

10098 13y ago

What you learn in college/university depends only on yourself. Tests are just the most convenient, unified way to measure students' progress. There are two ways you can beat tests: one is to train specifically for the test, the other is to actually know the subject. The first way is easier, but leaves you with little residual knowledge, and you don't even know how to apply that knowledge. The second way is much harder, and it requires work on your part. However, it pays off. Not only you get to pass the test, you're also now armed with useful knowledge. At my time in university, I've taken both approaches towards various subjects. For the algorithms class, I made a lot of effort to study and understand the subject. Today, I still have it in my head, and can apply it when needed. For differential equations, I just studied for the test. I don't remember anything now, and it's my fault for being lazy. I got an "A" in both subjects, by the way. What I'm trying to say is, the system is just fine as long as qualified professors are teaching. The problem is lazy students.

jmduke 13y ago

I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too. I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.) I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper. I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.) I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's outcomes. I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it. (I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)

adamnemecek 13y ago
> I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I've had the same experience. And I hate how colleges seem not to recognize that.
- jmduke 13y ago
  Something I realized around seven semesters too late is that most programs are conducive to independent studies, which is I'm sure a wildly broad term but at my alma mater it was basically "Go spend three months on your own learning something interesting and then write a paper or a powerpoint or a plugin on it." You'd have an advisor (or sometimes a board of advisors) to meet with you every few weeks, but the work was all entirely self-directed, sort of like a mini-honors thesis. I imagine that those are going to become increasingly popular. If you abstract it out, its basically a credential system for productive independent thought, which is sort of the whole point.

mjmahone17 13y ago

Holy crap, UW's CS only has 200 graduates per year? For a school of that size, that's tiny. That's close to as many as most Ivy League schools these days, and their undergrad population is usually around 1/5 that of UW. This is especially sad, as CS courses should be pretty easy to scale, especially when you have a group of undergrads who want to teach. Not to mention how hypercompetitiveness drives out diversity, especially of minds, because the more competitive it is, the more of the "correct" hoops you have to jump through. This means that, if you struggle in math but are highly artistic, and could bring a different perspective to your courses, you're effectively shut out.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jacques_chester 13y ago
Most CS departments are small, because the 101 courses usually have enormous dropout rates. People come in thinking: I'll write apps. I'll write computer games. I'll be like the cool hackers in the movies. I'll be a billionaire. About halfway through their first cryptic gcc error message, these students discover that their burning passion is really for Arts or Business or whathaveyou.
nahname 13y ago
650ish enrolled with me when I went to school. It was down to about 250 after the first year. By the third year, only 4 of the 30 or so people I hung around with were still at it. Of all my peer group, I'm the only one currently programming (one's a QA, rest went to sales). Programming is way harder to learn than any of us can remember.
AlexanderMiller 13y ago
I was an undergrad TA for the intro CSE classes at UW, and I was impressed by the way the courses were run and proud to be a part of it, so it hurts me to read comments like this. You're right, there is a large pool of undergrads who want to teach, and the department takes full advantage of that. Unlike every other department at UW (that I know of), CSE pays undergrads to teach section (20 student classes that supplement the main lectures). Around 50 to 80 undergrads teach every quarter. Furthermore, the instructors are insanely dedicated to diversity of minds. They constantly try to incorporate different ways of thinking into their courses to encourage students who might not be the math-y or computer-y types to understand their own potential. As evidence of this: the principal lecturer of the intro classes, Stuart Reges, gives keynote speeches at educational conferences on the success of the UW CSE program in attracting and retaining women in CSE. There is a huge amount of diversity among CSE majors -- double majors in art, business, math, linguistics, etc. The problem is funding. Even though there is a huge demand for CSE degrees, the department doesn't have enough money to provide them. There's talk now of implementing differential tuition at UW, meaning that majoring in a high-demand field will cost you more than majoring in a low-demand one. This might allow the CSE department to fulfill the demand, but who knows if it's really a good idea. Sorry for the long winded reply! Didn't mean for this to stretch out. I guess I took your comment a little too personally. :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dev1n 13y ago

The greatest challenge our species has ever faced is the educational system itself. Almost. John Steinbeck said it best, IMO, "We now face the danger which has been the most destructive to the humans. Success, comfort, and ever increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."

arikrak 13y ago

>Any task that can be reduced to simply following a set of instructions over and over is being done by robots and software. Agreed. Along similar lines: Any problem that can be solved with clearly-defined steps can be programmed so that a computer can solve it. Many areas of education, especially math-related ones, involve students learning to mechanically implement set procedures and formulas to solve problems. These mechanical processes can all by definition be solved by a computer, so why pretend that these technologies do not exist? Human computers were once necessary, but they have since been supplanted. http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84 http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84

jacques_chester 13y ago
Sometimes it takes hundreds of exposures to concrete examples to grasp the abstract principle. I'm sure we've all had a-ha! moments of the form "it's just like Professor Whatsisname / Coach Thingo / Mrs So-and-so said, I just didn't get it".
sowhatquestion 13y ago
I find it interesting there's one genre of indignant op-eds lamenting the death of creativity in education (including this one--not saying it's bad or formulaic, but it's definitely part of a genre).... and there's another genre lamenting that most college graduates are getting Starbucks barista type jobs that don't require creativity... Much scarier than the idea that the education system is failing, is the idea that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the increasingly meager role that our society assigns it. As OP points out, there isn't a textbook with the answers for meaningful real-world problems--but there is one that tells you precisely how many pumps of chocolate syrup go in a grande mocha. HN readers may be a priori more prepared to accept the watered-down version of this idea. "Of course the system needs creative problem solving, that's the most important part of my job!" If this describes you, congratulations, you are one of the priviliged few who has what the economist David Autor calls an "analytic" job. In fact, it's increasingly likely that the very purpose of your job is to ensure that there's no middle ground between you and those textbook-following Starbucks workers[1]. 1: http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-job-destroyer/ http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-jo...

techboots 13y ago

You learned how the real world works. It's inefficient, it's not fair, and it's corrupt.

AlexanderMiller 13y ago

How would you design the CSE admissions process? What would you change? Have you considered the pressure and lack of resources the admissions committee is forced to deal with? What about the students who received 4.0's in all intro math and computer science classes? Why should the department devote precious educational resources to you, rather than to them? We all wish that CSE was an open major at UW. But you're ignoring a huge amount of complex practical issues when you blame bureaucracy. You offer simplistic criticism but no solutions.

blackhole 13y ago
The CSE program does not use its funding very well. This is not something I claim, it's something a CSE professor told me when I pointed out various shortcomings, and he agreed with many of them but was not in a position to do anything about it. That said, the CSE program doesn't have enough funding in the first place, either. That's the primary issue.

calhoun137 13y ago

The most important thing I learned in college was how to learn things on my own.

alexgartrell 13y ago

It's really hard to not come across as ad hominem when you're disagreeing with OP's take on a personal experience, but I have very little patience for someone who sees or experiences something negative and does nothing more that cry into the wind. Fix the bug or find a work around. Lots of people managed to have great and very useful and applicable college experiences (I did) so maybe it's the OP who is wrong?

nnoitra 13y ago

It's about the environment and the people that surround you. It's not all about learning. It never was.

tehwalrus 13y ago

This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people (teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy. (even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.) I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots. Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.

azurelogic 13y ago

I had a very similar experience in undergrad. I skipped all sorts of classes and got great grades. I didn't care. I put off studying weeks of material until days before the exam. I'd even have a beer or 2 before exams. It wasn't stimulating. For me, part of that was because I was doing the wrong thing the whole time. I was studying biochem when I should have been learning to code. When I went back for my masters in CS, I actually tried and cared. I think I missed 3 classes the whole time and only because I was too sick to go. Passion for becoming the best programmer I could be drove me to try harder and harder. While I know that school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about software development, I refused to let anything that I could learn slip by.

cafard 13y ago

Useless facts are useless if not not organized (by the learner) into a useful structure. My impression is that a lot of schools have responded to this not by helping the students to organize the facts but by going light on facts instead.