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As you may have realized, any adult older than forty went through college back when it was lots cheaper and students routinely graduated with job offers in hand

As you may have realized, any adult older than forty went through college back when it was lots cheaper and students routinely graduated with job offers in hand. You may be wise to discount our advice. I wouldn't spend fifty or a hundred thousand dollars slogging through a major that you hate, in exchange for a reward that you can't see yet. Take a break for a while and get that full-time iOS developer job that you crave. Work for a while, save every penny you can, and await future developments. When circumstances change, and iOS developers become as commonplace as Java developers are today, or the economy cools off for a while, or you find yourself jammed against a career ceiling, or you become bored out of your mind in your little cubicle, or you grow a little older and suddenly realize that your dream is to become a computational molecular biologist with an art studio: College will still be there. Believe me, even when you're forty and fifty colleges will still happily take your money. (Although I was once warned that medical schools don't admit students older than thirty-five, so don't wait too long to become a heart surgeon.)

tptacek 12y ago
As someone with the opposite experience (I have just a semester of college): if you're even a little bit successful with the iOS development job, it's going to be very hard to go back to school. Once you let it, life happens fast. I don't regret not going to college, but I'm not happy about how drastically my life choices foreclosed it for me.
- mechanical_fish 12y ago
  Okay, I'll take your word for it. Let me put on a different hat and try a different tack. --- This is the best time in your life to go to college. It will be harder to go back, later. But you're wasting your limited college time on iOS development, which has nothing to do with college and vice versa. You will have the rest of your life to build iOS applications, if that's what you want. (In ten years, let alone twenty or thirty, it probably won't be.) But you'll only have a few years of access to a university: It costs a fortune to go, and it's hard to find the time. Make the university count, or take my original advice and get out until you're ready to take it seriously. You need a real major: That is, one which is real to you. Based on your question, I'm not convinced that CS is it. I count three mentions of iOS in your question, and zero mentions of such things as compiler theory, concurrent operating systems, cryptography, programmable logic, deep-UV photolithography, or computer vision algorithms. If you can't get inspired by anything from that list, or if your so-called CS department doesn't offer such subjects, study something else. (Just because you like programming doesn't mean you're supposed to like CS. CS is to programming as physiology is to playing football, and you can love weight training, passing, and tackling without necessarily loving vesicular transport and the troponin-tropomyosin complex.) I'm a physicist so I tend to recommend sciences - physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, meteorology - or mathematics, or engineering. But I know wonderful programmers who studied classical music, medieval Icelandic, and Renaissance essays. (And art, architecture, and design, of course, but that goes without saying.) Steve Jobs, legendarily, only liked one college course: Calligraphy. It doesn't matter what you study. Find something more challenging, more interesting, or more awesome. Labs. You'll never see them again once you graduate. Take every lab course you can stomach. It saddens me to hear complaints about electives. Elective courses are beautiful. The best of them are professionally-guided tours of other fields, custom-designed to showcase the good parts. Ask around, find out who the best teachers are, and take whatever they offer.

tptacek 12y ago

As someone with the opposite experience (I have just a semester of college): if you're even a little bit successful with the iOS development job, it's going to be very hard to go back to school. Once you let it, life happens fast. I don't regret not going to college, but I'm not happy about how drastically my life choices foreclosed it for me.

mechanical_fish 12y ago
Okay, I'll take your word for it. Let me put on a different hat and try a different tack. --- This is the best time in your life to go to college. It will be harder to go back, later. But you're wasting your limited college time on iOS development, which has nothing to do with college and vice versa. You will have the rest of your life to build iOS applications, if that's what you want. (In ten years, let alone twenty or thirty, it probably won't be.) But you'll only have a few years of access to a university: It costs a fortune to go, and it's hard to find the time. Make the university count, or take my original advice and get out until you're ready to take it seriously. You need a real major: That is, one which is real to you. Based on your question, I'm not convinced that CS is it. I count three mentions of iOS in your question, and zero mentions of such things as compiler theory, concurrent operating systems, cryptography, programmable logic, deep-UV photolithography, or computer vision algorithms. If you can't get inspired by anything from that list, or if your so-called CS department doesn't offer such subjects, study something else. (Just because you like programming doesn't mean you're supposed to like CS. CS is to programming as physiology is to playing football, and you can love weight training, passing, and tackling without necessarily loving vesicular transport and the troponin-tropomyosin complex.) I'm a physicist so I tend to recommend sciences - physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, meteorology - or mathematics, or engineering. But I know wonderful programmers who studied classical music, medieval Icelandic, and Renaissance essays. (And art, architecture, and design, of course, but that goes without saying.) Steve Jobs, legendarily, only liked one college course: Calligraphy. It doesn't matter what you study. Find something more challenging, more interesting, or more awesome. Labs. You'll never see them again once you graduate. Take every lab course you can stomach. It saddens me to hear complaints about electives. Elective courses are beautiful. The best of them are professionally-guided tours of other fields, custom-designed to showcase the good parts. Ask around, find out who the best teachers are, and take whatever they offer.