3 ms·

I agree... instead of trying to make up projects, schools should just send students on internship gigs at the end of 3rd and 4th year.

by Maro 17y ago

kschults 17y ago
Waiting until the 3rd and 4th year makes even less sense. The sooner that schools can get their students out in the real world, doing real world projects, as the author described, the sooner they'll learn how to develop good code. Schools should be pushing students to get internships after their second, and even after their first year. I'm in an internship after my second year of school, and I have many times wished I'd had an internship last year as well. Even still, I've learned way more this summer than I did in the first two years of college combined.
Eastbeast314 17y ago
I had 6 internships under my belt by college graduation and they taught me a lot. However, by and large, I learned more about workplaces and teamwork than about difficult programming situations. Internships, in most of my experience, don't encourage really hard programming work. I got that with my CS degree. The theory classes were 7 out of the 15 classes I took, but the programming classes were just as intense. We did complex image recognition in groups in Java the first year, tons of Scheme and Oz to learn concepts, and then wrote a whole networking stack and basic Linux OS in C. The latter two projects were significantly harder than anything I've done at an internship and required teamwork and a great deal of self-teaching. It may be that my experience was abnormal (the school had a small but recognized CS dept), but I got the meat of my practical programming skills at school (ignoring independent work for the sake of focused discussion). Internships were certainly useful - but in my reflections I don't think they increased my programming power, if you will, all that much compared to school.

I agree... instead of trying to make up projects, schools should just send students on internship gigs at the end of 3rd and 4th year.

by Maro 17y ago

I agree... instead of trying to make up projects, schools should just send students on internship gigs at the end of 3rd and 4th year.

kschults 17y ago

Waiting until the 3rd and 4th year makes even less sense. The sooner that schools can get their students out in the real world, doing real world projects, as the author described, the sooner they'll learn how to develop good code. Schools should be pushing students to get internships after their second, and even after their first year. I'm in an internship after my second year of school, and I have many times wished I'd had an internship last year as well. Even still, I've learned way more this summer than I did in the first two years of college combined.

Eastbeast314 17y ago

I had 6 internships under my belt by college graduation and they taught me a lot. However, by and large, I learned more about workplaces and teamwork than about difficult programming situations. Internships, in most of my experience, don't encourage really hard programming work. I got that with my CS degree. The theory classes were 7 out of the 15 classes I took, but the programming classes were just as intense. We did complex image recognition in groups in Java the first year, tons of Scheme and Oz to learn concepts, and then wrote a whole networking stack and basic Linux OS in C. The latter two projects were significantly harder than anything I've done at an internship and required teamwork and a great deal of self-teaching. It may be that my experience was abnormal (the school had a small but recognized CS dept), but I got the meat of my practical programming skills at school (ignoring independent work for the sake of focused discussion). Internships were certainly useful - but in my reflections I don't think they increased my programming power, if you will, all that much compared to school.