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Is school REALLY that important or useful? (pg. 10)
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by ziptnf
:stongue:
Wait, dude, I'm sorry, but this is wrong.
#1) If it takes you 8 years to get your bachelors degree, you won't get hired anyways, because you're dumb. |
What good is a BS these days? You need to go to grad-school to work at anything fulfilling if your route is getting papers to your name.
| quote: | Originally posted by ziptnf
#2) Most people I know in my field (not just computer engineering, but all engineers) not only have a well-paying job in their field, but are almost guaranteed an equal job or better coming out of college. My program is a 5 year masters program, so you literally only have to stay 2 more semesters after getting your bachelors to waltz on out with your Masters degree. That achievement will be a hell of a lot more impressive than work on an open source game with a group of other developers. Also, it will earn me more stacks in the long run.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, Nou, there are plenty of students in my classes who are worthless and don't have a job right now. They just skip class, don't do their homework till the last minute, and skim by in their classes. Those guys will be harder to hire, simply because of lack of experience. I'm just saying I know plenty of people in my university that are going to be really well off. |
I am not deying that going to school is a good thing. Like you (?) said how can it be bad? Its just I'd rather be working, making money right off the bat than going to school and paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn something I already know just to have a piece of paper that says I know it.
Also like I said earlier I really am not looking, right now, at working for someone else.
We are in the process of starting a company to market products to the VBS users. While our community projects source is online for public view, its still copyrighted and not under any open license. The VBS platform is definitely not open source. Its a many hundreds of dollars per seat closed source military trainer. :p |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by bas
That's great, but unfortunately that one example wouldn't really cut it. A big thing that you're forced to learn at a university is time/people management. Being part of a relatively small team (you said 2 or 3?) just means they're competent. Not that you're a good manager. |
The whole time I was working there I was being under-payed to not only code, but to manage my own projects as well as manage client relations. :p I am actually a really good people person when I am trying to help people out (especially when they are paying me to do it). |
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| -FSP- |
School is pretty useless. You can learn anything on this new thing called the intrawebz. Or the library. School is a business. They don't really care about education. They care about building a brand name, even though it really does not matter in the undergrad level imo. I mean, you aren't exactly trying to innovate your discipline in undergrad, you are trying to learn the fundamentals and what's cutting edge at the moment. It doesn't matter if you're at random state college or a random ivy university, i'm willing to bet you are both learning the same thing. So school in itself is useless.
The paper and the brand name of your university will help you get jobs though. And depending on the prestige of the university brand name, you can network and step your foot into the ol' boys' network. It's useful for networking and ass kissing, but you can learn about CS in your own home.
Students are just stimulus packages. Society forces them to spend spend spend. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| If I do a 4 year its going to be the UW, outside of Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT they are pretty much one of the top names in any sort of CSE field or engineering field. |
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| Schadenfreude |
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| tachobg |
| quote: | Originally posted by -FSP-
School is pretty useless. You can learn anything on this new thing called the intrawebz. Or the library. School is a business. They don't really care about education. They care about building a brand name, even though it really does not matter in the undergrad level imo. I mean, you aren't exactly trying to innovate your discipline in undergrad, you are trying to learn the fundamentals and what's cutting edge at the moment. It doesn't matter if you're at random state college or a random ivy university, i'm willing to bet you are both learning the same thing. So school in itself is useless.
The paper and the brand name of your university will help you get jobs though. And depending on the prestige of the university brand name, you can network and step your foot into the ol' boys' network. It's useful for networking and ass kissing, but you can learn about CS in your own home.
Students are just stimulus packages. Society forces them to spend spend spend. |
Sorry, no.
The benefits of a (good) school are enormous.*
*(Even so, if you can't afford it, you have to consider the drawbacks)
The benefit of going to a good school is that you'll get exposed to people and ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise.
This exposure comes in the form of formal education (i.e. classes) as well as informal education (talking to other bright, curious, or otherwise interesting people about stuff). The two types of education mutually reinforce each other.
The formal education might be similar to lower tier schools, but the informal education -- the people -- are what makes a world of difference.
In terms of formal education, you might decide to take a class about brains, even though it's not in your major. And you can! And you might love it! And it might change the direction of your educational and even life goals. But wait, you say -- I can just go online and learn about brains - school!
The thing is, when you're sitting at home, there's no one around you to talk to you about brains at 4 in the morning and get you excited enough about them to make you take a class. Sure, you might be sitting at home and decide that you want to learn about brains because you think it might be cool, but what about all those things that you NEVER KNEW, and COULDN'T have known were cool and worth studying?
Also, being around other people that do cool things will keep you motivated, inspired and humbled and challenged. Self-taught people (programmers for example) have the risk of remaining naive and becoming arrogant. School also teaches you to work with other people and to communicate effectively. You can learn that on the job, but on your first day of work, you're effectively a high-schooler in terms of interpersonal and communication skills in a professional environment (sure, some high-schoolers are already mature in that regard).
Okay, full disclosure -- I go to a good school. And I don't have to pay a lot of money for it. If the opposite were true, I'd have to weigh my options more carefully. But if I settled for cheap/bad school or no school, I really think I would be worse off. And I'm lucky I don't have to make that choice.
One other thing -- what if another environment can give you these same benefits, or "network effects" that come from interacting with other like minded people? One good example is hacker/maker spaces where people get together to tinker on and learn about various electrical/mechanical/craft/art and other creative projects. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by -FSP-
School is pretty useless. You can learn anything on this new thing called the intrawebz. Or the library. |
Except of course that most people in my experience are woefully inept at teaching themselves anything. Who will parse your work and learning? How do you know you really “get it” without somebody looking over your shoulder correcting your mistakes? Your attitude is exactly what produces a bunch of ignorant know-it-alls who think reading a webpage is a valid substitute for the more rigorous process of producing quality work (that has to pass more than just your own standards). |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
Except of course that most people in my experience are woefully inept at teaching themselves anything. Who will parse your work and learning? How do you know you really “get it” without somebody looking over your shoulder correcting your mistakes? Your attitude is exactly what produces a bunch of ignorant know-it-alls who think reading a webpage is a valid substitute for the more rigorous process of producing quality work (that has to pass more than just your own standards). |
This +1 |
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| tachobg |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
Except of course that most people in my experience are woefully inept at teaching themselves anything. Who will parse your work and learning? How do you know you really “get it” without somebody looking over your shoulder correcting your mistakes? Your attitude is exactly what produces a bunch of ignorant know-it-alls who think reading a webpage is a valid substitute for the more rigorous process of producing quality work (that has to pass more than just your own standards). |
Spot on. This is what I was trying to say about some self-learners being naive and arrogant. Self-learning is a skill that is difficult to develop in a vacuum. It requires merciless self-criticism and self-honesty. School is a good way to teach you that. If you delude yourself about your knowledge of physics, and then fail your physics test, that's a swift kick in the ass to tell you to be more critical of your yourself and your learning process. When you're sitting in front of your computer at home, there's no one to tell you that you're wrong. As a result, you never learn to tell yourself that you are wrong. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
BTW this whole argument is pretty much not what I am intending to do eitherway...
I am going to do school, I have a free ride basically for as long as I want to do school, so the whole money argument I am making is for purpose of debate only.
I do feel that placing school though second to securing wealth early is a better option though in a lot of cases. Don't let opportunities slip through your fingers, thats the stuff that can destroy you. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
These people who criticise formal education are ing hypocrites anyway. When they’re sick do they go to a doctor, or to someone who watches grey’s anatomy or the occasional youtube video on medicine? That’s not to say that a small percentage of people can’t become experts all by themselves, gifted people like that obviously exist. But they’re hardly the norm.
Education is just one more life experience. You can get from it anything you wish to. |
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