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You're going to have to live with this - the point of college is to teach you how to learn. Longer version: For the last two years I've worked for a major uni

by smoyer 13y ago

You're going to have to live with this - the point of college is to teach you how to learn. Longer version: For the last two years I've worked for a major university - one of the top fifty. Prior to working for the university, I spent thirty years in industry. During my time in the commercial market, I thought of universities as ivory towers were everything is the latest and greatest ... because reading research papers only shows you the latest and greatest. When I got here, I was shocked to find that many of our systems were 15, 20 or even 25 years behind those we were using in industry. Not that they weren't stable, but since our primary job is to "educate the youngin's", working systems were valued but there is no competitive advantage to replacing them. My son is a super-senior in college, and I've noticed that the information he's learning is (on average) five to ten years old. And this actually makes sense. Research is bleeding edge, but much of it isn't commercially valuable. Since undergrad degrees are supposed to produce graduates who can obtain jobs in industry, industry generally has to adopt a technology before it's likely to be used in education. Once industry adopts a technology, a professor (or department) has to recognize that adoption, make sure it's not simply a technology fad, verify that it aligns with the theoretical approaches that are valid and develop a curriculum. Your university is actually providing you a valuable education by focusing on the technologies that are valued in industry, albeit a little behind the curve. Why? Because JSP is still used by a huge number of corporations and as a mark-up representation it's a pretty good example of many comparable technologies. Furthermore, JSF has been strengthened in the latest JavaEE releases and many large corporations have adopted these changes. What if you don't want to work for a big stodgy corporation? You probably didn't need to go to a big stodgy corporation, but I question whether you're really following the technology trends very well. "PHP instead of XML+XSLT" sounds like a horrible way to do ETL, even for a start-up. Why wouldn't you pick NodeJS in that instance? There are thousands of technology stacks and it's not practical for your university to teach all of them to you. how invested are you in learning the ones you're curious about outside of your classwork? You do realize you're responsible for your education and career right? If you don't learn new technologies on your own in the corporate world, you'll be quickly outdated. So finally, my suggestion: Learn one of the technologies you're interested in, then go have a discussion with the professor about how that technology compares with what he's teaching you. I'm hoping he'll be intellectually curious and engage deeply in a conversation like this - recognizing that he can also learn something in the process. If not, your professor has indeed failed.

ponyous 13y ago
Thanks for your reply it makes sense. This fellow student also said something along this lines:"Next year I'm dropping out, I can learn 10 times more on my own than here...". What Do you think of this? Is this good decision? Few of you mentioned "The point of college is to teach you how to learn", which seems interesting but it doesn't seem useful for me anymore since I already know a lot of stuff/tech, should I also drop out? What is your suggestion for a student who is amongst the best in college? (I already had a few job offers from start-ups in my country, I have good references, I'm researching on my own, won a few Computer science competitions...). Currently I'm working for a startup and completing first year of college, but replies here got me thinking - I might drop out next year. I wrote PHP just as an example I actually had Node written there but then I changed my mind and wrote PHP instead of Node, because its more popular. You can replace PHP with anything more popular/new/trendy/useful there.
- danpalmer 13y ago
  I could learn 10 times more in my own time, about Node.js and MongoDB. It would take me 10 times longer, if I ever got around to it, to learn about theories of computation, languages/grammars/parsers, operating systems, discrete mathematics, evolutionary algorithms, cryptography... There's more depth to the subject than the technologies that are popular right now.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- meric 13y ago
  I've been programming before I got into university, and for me, there would have been a lot of stuff I wouldn't have gone to learn on my own if I hadn't heard about it in university. Going to university exposed me to new ideas I could further explore deeply in my own time. It also help formalised some of my knowledge, for example the language theory behind regular expressions, as well as what OOP means exactly. More ways to describe concepts in my head, I think, has helped me compose bigger ideas. Today I'm working as a web developer using Django in Python. I'd imagine if it wasn't for having watched my professor demonstrate a cgi C program web server, I wouldn't have gone on to dig up rabbit holes in php, rails, app-engine, and finally django in my own time, and I suppose rather than working as a web developer (and doing "real engineering" using version control, unit testing, integration testing, etc... all of which I first heard about in university and then further explored in my own time) I'd be slaving away in a company which works without version control and wouldn't know any better. And yes, don't laugh, I have indeed worked in a company part time without version control, before I learnt about it in university; when I did learn about it I introduced it to the company, and then quit. Let me tell you they were very grateful I told them about it. Nowadays they no longer merge code by hand. "Next year I'm dropping out, I can learn 10 times more on my own than here..." I have found that to be generally true, i.e. I learn 10 times faster, on my own time, than attending lectures and doing tutorials and doing assignments, all of which were dumbed down for the average student, but in spite of that, university has still been worth it for me.

by smoyer 13y ago

ponyous 13y ago

Thanks for your reply it makes sense. This fellow student also said something along this lines:"Next year I'm dropping out, I can learn 10 times more on my own than here...". What Do you think of this? Is this good decision? Few of you mentioned "The point of college is to teach you how to learn", which seems interesting but it doesn't seem useful for me anymore since I already know a lot of stuff/tech, should I also drop out? What is your suggestion for a student who is amongst the best in college? (I already had a few job offers from start-ups in my country, I have good references, I'm researching on my own, won a few Computer science competitions...). Currently I'm working for a startup and completing first year of college, but replies here got me thinking - I might drop out next year. I wrote PHP just as an example I actually had Node written there but then I changed my mind and wrote PHP instead of Node, because its more popular. You can replace PHP with anything more popular/new/trendy/useful there.

danpalmer 13y ago
I could learn 10 times more in my own time, about Node.js and MongoDB. It would take me 10 times longer, if I ever got around to it, to learn about theories of computation, languages/grammars/parsers, operating systems, discrete mathematics, evolutionary algorithms, cryptography... There's more depth to the subject than the technologies that are popular right now.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
meric 13y ago
I've been programming before I got into university, and for me, there would have been a lot of stuff I wouldn't have gone to learn on my own if I hadn't heard about it in university. Going to university exposed me to new ideas I could further explore deeply in my own time. It also help formalised some of my knowledge, for example the language theory behind regular expressions, as well as what OOP means exactly. More ways to describe concepts in my head, I think, has helped me compose bigger ideas. Today I'm working as a web developer using Django in Python. I'd imagine if it wasn't for having watched my professor demonstrate a cgi C program web server, I wouldn't have gone on to dig up rabbit holes in php, rails, app-engine, and finally django in my own time, and I suppose rather than working as a web developer (and doing "real engineering" using version control, unit testing, integration testing, etc... all of which I first heard about in university and then further explored in my own time) I'd be slaving away in a company which works without version control and wouldn't know any better. And yes, don't laugh, I have indeed worked in a company part time without version control, before I learnt about it in university; when I did learn about it I introduced it to the company, and then quit. Let me tell you they were very grateful I told them about it. Nowadays they no longer merge code by hand. "Next year I'm dropping out, I can learn 10 times more on my own than here..." I have found that to be generally true, i.e. I learn 10 times faster, on my own time, than attending lectures and doing tutorials and doing assignments, all of which were dumbed down for the average student, but in spite of that, university has still been worth it for me.