Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Different styles of college? My college shaped me and what I learned carried me until today. Case in point, I don't think I would learn how to write a database engine, albeit a single-threaded one, from scratch with progressive difficulties, if my professors didn't design the course properly. I wouldn't be equipped with intuitive understanding of maths and stats that I can express using the proper language such as linear algebra, if it were not for the rigorous training given by college. I wouldn't be able to use queuing theory to analyze systems fresh out of college if it were not for tons of fun of studying queuing systems in college. I wouldn't have no difficulty picking up any programming language if it were not for the courses on programming language theories. I wouldn't even know the advanced mathematical logic and formal verifications and computability and a long list of other things if it were not for excellent teaching and unwavering demand from my professors. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to deeply appreciate English classics like The Great Gatsby and Mobi Dick, given that I could barely pass TOFLE when I went to my college, if it were not for the excellent and rigorous writing course given by a demanding lecturer.

I'm forever indebted to my college

Almost all of what I was presented with in college felt like a very slow motion way to learn the required material, most of which I had already taught myself via the internet. It felt as if reading the textbook and then creating a project at the end would have allowed me to finish the courses faster than having to survive through lectures for several hours a week.

Some classes were exactly like that: the professor taught straight from the book, so I stopped going to class and just read the textbook instead. I showed up for the finals and got an A (or turned in a project at the end of the semester and got an A)

But other than the CS classes, there was a ton of filler crap meant to line the pockets of the administrators. Various math and science, art, history and english classes wasted the vast majority of my first 2 years at college. If you were to cut out the filler and allow students more flexibility in how they learned, you could cut a bachelor's degree down from 4 years to 1 or 2.

However, I think that the excruciating length of college is a selling point: Americans who go to college are looking for an all-inclusive resort at which they can fuck each other's brains out while they defer the real world and adulthood for another 4 years, only becoming marginally useful to the world 6 months after graduating, when they've been fully de-programmed at their jobs of all the useless and incorrect information they were provided during their degree. I truly believe that most people go to college in an attempt to prolong their childhoods into their mid 20s.

College, to me, is just a bloated jobs program for middle management types to suck up tens of thousands of dollars per student in tuition while providing dubious value in return.

> I'm forever indebted to my college

I am, too, but not in the same way as you.

I remember when we were taking an algorithm course, the professor gave us a proof question on the CLR book. It's a property of universal hashing and it used to be a well known corollary. It took me multiple hours to crack the insight that led to the proof. That level of teaching - the ability to select the right problems to nail deep concepts and to push us to grow - is hard to come by if we teach ourselves. At least not for ordinary students like me.

My other issue with college, especially in CS, was the amount of theory classes we took. The vast majority of CS students just want to be software engineers; most CS theory is not useful for that goal

Strangely, I find theories, at least up to junior graduate level, amazingly useful in building systems.

What does Junior Graduate level mean?

It means they are still courses instead of seminars, and they are not necessarily cutting-edge research materials. Many of the courses are taught to senior undergrads too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com