Private Universities in India provides you just a Degree- A student rant

Hi I wanted to put this up:

I was in a very very reputed AIEEE university in one of their fit for nothing dual degree programs. And trust me most assignments and project work comprise of plagiarized and glue code. It had more than 75 % compulsory attendance, after which grade drops happen.

There are some good students...some really good students... who do well in really getting at the essence of programming.But everyone else is lost.

You find disinterested people working on projects. And if you are in one dual degree program and work on other field's projects ( on our own ) you get letters from the dean and your department head reprimanding you to invest your time in your field. BTW, all these fields I am talking about are about simple and elegant software.

Result : I quit.

I am pursuing a B.Sc Degree in IT from SMU-DE. Yes it is not the same as from the above institution. But it lets me participate in community development better. It gives me time to participate in SPOJ, TopCoder, Directi's CodeChef.And it doesn't prevent me from participating in GSoC. It doesn't threaten me and stop me from attending NASA's Summer Internships. And most of all, I don't have to succumb to their policies.

I find solace from learning through MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford's Online Classes in AI, ML and DB. My github and other projects feed my resume. Yes, there is a unrest at home about where I am headed. But I know where I am and where I am headed.

I was clear that this institution was not worth 1.5 lakh per annum from my parent's life savings. I quit, in my second year.

But trust me. If you move out, you will have to face immense mental pressure from the family. And if you can work from your college, do so at all costs. Moving out will create new problems that you cannot predict now.

Been there, done that.

But if you're seriously considering dropping out, good luck with finding a job in the sort of competitive market you're in. With more than a thousand applications per job listing, the recruiters will first cut out the non-degreed/non-engineers. Then you're looking at a select few (like Zoho) who may take you in for a marked down pay which gets you no where.

Or you can try to make it on your own, put in several man hours of effort into an idea and push it to market. If you do manage to get a release out, know that your odds of success have improved from nothing to one in a hundred.

Or you could simply suck it up, maintain a minimal profile at college necessary to get your degree, and work the nights on getting a real education. Then you're in a (IMO) far better position, life-wise.

Stop cribbing about something you have little control over, and focus on doing what you can to improve things for yourself, and if you see fit, for others.

I understand your frustration. I too graduated from such a private college with a CS degree in 2003. Here is why I think you should complete your degree:

- You are being forced to study the core areas in CS. You will probably soon specialize in your work/research, so learn the core areas when you still have the time.

- Unless you have already created exceptional products, regular employers will not consider you unless you have a degree; these employers are a good fallback if nothing else works. The degree is a baseline to avoid being filtered out.

- If you want to go to graduate school to do research, either now or in the future, an undergraduate degree is essential.

- Getting a B.Tech isn't hard. Put in the minimum effort if you want, but it isn't tough to pass, nor is it a time sink.

Yes, the teaching can be unimaginative, professors may strictly adhere to a syllabus, and the exams test rote memorization, but one can still be stimulated in this environment. I would unceasingly ask questions to fully understand algorithms being taught in class, often challenging professors (and finding holes in the thought process). The database class helped me understand normalization and other ideas of good DB design (and their rationale), which I used for my web projects. A queuing theory class helped me understand performance of a system I later built.

There is no doubt you need to go beyond just getting the degree. Do you have fantastic ideas for products? Maybe a bit of freelancing will help? I created websites for clients abroad while doing my undergrad (just get a low bandwidth internet connection from a mobile company for this). I interned with companies/organizations during the summer. For my final year project I wrote a simd+cluster version of a program that I ran on all the computers in the department's lab (and tripped the ups!). I also realized the importance of a degree and tried to stay close to the top of my graduating class.

The challenge is to stay motivated to get the degree, while also finding an outlet for your passion. Both can be done. Freelance during the semester working nights and weekends; work with a company during the summer; participate in CS competitions in your region; find a local conference in an area of interest and publish a paper (this isn't hard!). It's really up to you to get motivated and rise above the rest.

While I sometimes wish I had done my undergrad elsewhere, I was eventually able to work in an area of my interest. I went to graduate school abroad and am now working in a research department in industry doing what I love.

As Mark Twain said, never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Nor should you let your schooling make you cynical, or drain you of your love for learning, or kill your ambition. Because you will continue to encounter resistance in the form of people, culture, and institutions that seem to exist solely for perpetuating mediocrity and fake work. They may operate that way, but that doesn't mean everyone does.

Steve Jobs quotes are practically cliche now, but, stay hungry. That tenacity is what will make you if you channel it into creating something.

Well my friend, here are a few things you should know: 1. If you are interested in research, you should approach professors/find out what they are doing etc, even at the worst of schools, there is always someone doing something worthwhile. 2. As it looks like you are already following hacker news, keeping up to the posts on the front page itself should give you a lot of ideas and things to tinker around with. 3. Believe me, undergrad education is useless, everyone does it to get a degree. What really matters is the environment around. The people around you will help you learn more at school than the course itself does. 4. Ask yourself these simple questions, if the answer is a "no", try working towards making it a "yes" : Do you have a GITHUB Account ? Have you tried getting your hands dirty with any OSS project ? (not necessarily code, configuration ? testing ?) Do you follow journals in your area of Interest ? Which courses do you love at school ? Have you supplemented the course with some extra reading ?

These are just a few questions that can get you started, for example, the course for algorithms/data structures at most schools in india sucks big time, why not follow it up with a reading of AOCP or the MIT algorithms book. And yes as someone already mentioned, concentrating on work rather than cribbing about the system will take you better places. BTW, I did my undergrad from a so called "reputed private university" in India too.

My 2 cents of advice.

Do not drop out unless you are filthy rich. It doesn't work in an Indian environment where companies and jobs depend on what your under graduate college is and your qualification. Companies only visit BIG and reputed colleges and no matter how bad you are, you might be lucky in getting selected for the job. That is what you are paying for, its for that damn job and not for the research and education.

But I think you are going in the right direction. If I look back at myself 4 years ago, I am in the same position as yours. Its good that you are looking at the MIT and Stanford's courses. They help you a lot in learning new concepts. Also make yourself comfortable with programming. at the end of the day, it boils down to how good you can apply your concepts and code stuff. Find some interesting projects on Github. Fork it and work on it. you might not be successful at your first attempt. But you will learn a lot of things on your way. Involve yourself in various open source projects and hackers club in your local city and I'm sure you will be successfull.

I understand your frustration like many others on this forum. I graduated more than a decade ago, when Web was still in its early stage(s). If I were going to an engg school today, I would have similar thoughts as you are having right now.

I will not advice you to drop-out or in other words, throw a degree out of the window. I think @doosra does mention that you can just do minimal in college to get a degree and I think you should do that.

There are open courses from some of the best universities around and especially now that Stanford has Spring courses online, free; there is no way you should give up.

Spend more time learning and doing. You just don't only have online courses to see but also, the time is ripe to build things. We have an awesome platform and some good problems to solve. Maybe students like you will come up with some, who knows.

Happy hacking!

You say you have finished 3 semesters of your graduation. But I think 4,5,6 semesters are where you learn most of the core of CS, atleast as per Indian curriculum. Give yourself some time.

Start a CSE club at your college. Organise lectures with the help of your serniors. Or each one of you can start learning about a technology and start sharing it with each other in the meetups. Organise programming contests, organise hackathons. You can also try and collaborate with local LUGs and get lectures conducted. Your institute will slowly start seeming to be full of buzz where there is lot of knowledge flow. And then it will all seem great.

Try and

As the author mentioned- the main problem is spoon feeding. This should be checked in early childhood and school education. Moreover a professor won't waste his time if students are not ready for learning.

Been there my friend, I too passed out from a so called reputed private University.and too bad I came to know about hacker news only in the last year of my college :(

thats whats is happening to me also. Though we don't have attendance problem, but un-interesting teaching from professors have led to me not paying attention to me college academics and drama. do it your own. and best of luck!!!

Are you talking about Amity University