Ask HN: How do I survive college? (Is there any other way?) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I survive college? (Is there any other way?)

2 pointsmkeedlinger7 comments

I am currently a CS student in college, and the hoop-jumping has really gotten to me. It feels like for every nugget of knowledge I gain, it requires jumping through 5 hoops. The degree is taking too long. Classes have become monotonous and move too slowly. Classes that cover material I want to learn are structured in a way that loses my interest. I am bored.

Essentially, I am losing motivation to continue my college education. I love the idea of college, but what I’m doing now isn’t working out for me in practice. If I keep the current path I will drop out.

Is there any other way? Maybe a decent online college with accelerated courses? Or maybe I should go directly into the work field? Has anyone else felt the same? Any advice is appreciated.

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Here’s a little more information if it helps:

I am not new to Computer Science. I have held programming jobs since High School and was able to secure an SDE internship at a FAANG company my Freshman year in college, which I am returning to for the third time this summer. During school I work part-time at a startup. Really the only reason I am in college is to fill some gaps in my knowledge and to check a box and get the degree.

Also, I LOVE learning! I’m sorry if I come off as somewhat pretentious, I promise that isn’t me. I know I have much more to learn; I am just hoping to find a path that works better for me.

Thanks!

I was bored of university by my third year. I was itching to get out and work. About 2 years later I would have loved to be back at university... Grass is always greener, right?

My reasons were probably different to yours. The computer world certainly wasn't as 'fast' at that point and I was by no means some kind of super student. And FWIW, I don't think my degree really opened any doors after, and 2 or 3 years later I don't think anyone cared at all.

THAT said, stick it out - in the grand scheme of things you don't have long left. Firstly, you'll avoid the "why did you drop out? Will you stick this job out?" questions in every interview you go to for the next few years. Secondly, you won't look back and go "why didn't I just finish that" (which may or may not happen - but only one path means it definitely won't).

Fill your spare time with other stuff. Do courses online, start side projects, find a non CS hobby. It's good practice anyway - pretty much every job from this point onwards will have periods where you think "this is shit" for one reason or another.

Lastly, enjoy yourself. You'll probably only get to do college once and when you look back, it's a tiny sliver of life.

If you're bored because the work is too easy, some options are:

-Study ahead of your lectures by using online sources and use the time freed up for something else.

-Ask your adviser to permit you to take advanced courses without meeting the prerequisites. If you're worried about GPA, there's usually an option to audit courses without getting a grade for it.

-Dig deeper into what your courses are teaching you. Undergraduate level courses often have graduate level courses that dive deeper into the same topic.

-Take courses in a different field to broaden your skills; particularly important if you think you're going to a FAANG. A statistics course would be good to have under your belt. Technical writing courses (most engineers can barely put together a sensible presentation or report) would also be good. The possibilities are endless.

(As an aside, if you think you're tired of monotony now, wait until you've been on the job a few years and the shine wears off.)

Seek and see the value in all you do. Arrive early, stay late, and put in a little extra. Sticking with your degree will build muscles for harder times you will surely face in your life.

Universities are great places to build your network. You have access to all sorts of people that you could not meet otherwise. This is how people get to be president and stuff like that.

As others mentioned, having a degree, especially a technical one, will help you in many unseen ways throughout your life. For one, it certifies to others that you have a marketable skill, that you know what you are talking about. Another is when layoff time comes at jobs, the degree is an extra point in your favor. You also need your undergrad to go on to a masters, be that technical or business or law.

Start a side business, hobby, family....school, like work, will suck at times and be hard to keep grinding away at. From someone at the other end of the spectrum, both the night school and work grinding enabled more results in my life than I ever expected to achieve.

Sorry, you are new to Computer Science. Undergraduate CS only covers a couple of percent of the topic. Do you know distributed systems, machine learning, robotics, image processing, concurrency, NLP, programming language design, hardware design, computer architecture, software engineering, program verification, security, databases, computer graphics, computer history? Probably not.

Read : Abstraction and Specification in Program Development, then read all four volumes of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. There are lots of courses on EdX, and MIT Open courseware.

Undergraduate CS is just the start, a tiny beginning.

The university is the best place to find a girl friend/ boy fried. Also a great place to make long term friends.

People who don't have a degree don't seem to really comprehend the benefits of having a degree because people simply don't tell you what they're willing to do for you as employers until you have a degree. Doors will open for you as someone with the degree that you wouldn't even know were there without one.

It is valuable because it is so hard. It is like getting an SSL certificate. It's really hard to do that or at least it used to be, but by doing so you can safely and verifiably prove to everybody that you are who you say you are. The degree is similar but it says that you can do what you say you can do.

Is this 1995??

10-15 years ago a degree had value. Today, no. More so when it puts someone in debt. Doors will open for a person with a degree or not. Its not about the degree, its about the person, their mindset and attitude.

SSL certs are not hard to get. Do you know about lets encrypt? Welcome to 2020.

People who build software by gluing together libraries and frameworks written by other people, they don't need a CS degree.

People who write libraries and frameworks that other people use, they need a CS degree. This person wants to be good enough to go to a FAANG so s/he's in this category.

Plus we're about to enter a recession that will make 2008 and the dot com bust combined look like a wet firecracker, so this person really, _really_ needs a degree.

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