Ask HN: What was the most useful elective you took in school?
Trying to decide what upper year electives to take.
Which ones have you found to be the most practical?
Which ones have you found to be the most practical?
An interesting side-effect of this course - I got _really_ good at using a console/command prompt and handling text with vim and pipes and filters and other text manipulation. I think this has helped me me productive at my jobs way more than I thought it would :)
Financial Accounting has been incredibly useful to understand how businesses operate and why they make many of the decisions they do. Not to mention understanding a bit about finances helps with investing.
Marketing was also a very important course, though not as a direct application as it is taught. Finding a job, and indeed many things at work require you to market yourself and/or your ideas. Understanding the principles of marketing makes being successful at your career much easier.
He has a blog about it.
Years later I launched a career in programming and these classes gave me an enormous edge
Specifically, basic journalistic writing practice. Taking a pile of info and turning it into a very concise and efficient written report. Valuable beyond measure.
Psst, here’s the secret (same as with breeding guppies): cull, cull, cull.
It taught me how to see. The professor was absolutely amazing, and the stuff he taught us was as much about life as it was about drawing.
This led to later courses in painting and photography that expanded on this. I almost became a professional photographer, but I realized that the art was addictive for me in an unhealthy way. I would get lost in my art and forget to eat, sleep, etc. While exhilarating, that was not the life I wanted to lead.
Note that the quality of the professor matters much more than the specific medium for most art courses, imho.
Technical writing teaches you to have a second voice which is simple, direct and unambiguous. It's a huge asset for business communication, documentation and SOPs.