Are you still in college? If so then this article might be really interesting to you. I recently graduated from the college in December 2005 and now if I look back and see what I have learnt from the university then nothing comes to my mind. I spent 3 and a half years in college completing my bachelors in computer science. I have to admit that I was an average student in college who submits his assignment on time and make an average grade in the exams.
Introduction:
Are you still in college? If so then this article might be really interesting to you. I recently graduated from the college in December 2005 and now if I look back and see what I have learnt from the university then nothing comes to my mind. I spent 3 and a half years in college completing my bachelors in computer science. I have to admit that I was an average student in college who submits his assignment on time and make an average grade in the exams. There are number of regrets that I have from my college which includes the following.
No teaching of the latest technologies:
My university is ruled by people who work in languages that have become obsolete. They are very good teachers but they are unable to pace themselves with the new technology. As we are the new generation and want to learn the current technology they are willing to teach us the technology that was used 10-15 years ago. At present .NET is a very hot technology but unfortunately there was only one class offered that introduced the concepts of the .NET technology.
No support for student from staff and faculty members:
Every student needs support from their staff and faculty members. I was one of the students who wanted to study something different, .NET in this case. I was very keen to learn .NET on my own unfortunately there were no machines in the university system that allowed you to create ASP.NET web applications since it requires the use of IIS and only Administrators had the privileges to use IIS. In my case I asked the staff members to give me permission to build web applications as I wanted to learn in my spare time but the permission was denied and they gave me the reason that you are not allowed to make web applications using university property. Another reason which was given to me was that I cannot use Visual Studio.NET since I am not enrolled in any class which uses Visual Studio.NET. As, I already told that there was only one class being offered that uses Visual Studio and I already took that class. Finally, I decided that this will not go anywhere and hence I bought a laptop so I can work remotely.
No choice of the programming language:
This might sound really strange but as a student I was never allowed to use a programming language of my choice. And I am not talking about low 1000 level courses but 4000 level (senior level) courses. I find it really disturbing that why do I have to use a particular programming language when I can do the same thing in less time with a different language?
More Code = More Points:
Yup that's true! The longer your code is the higher points you can get. So this means that if you have accomplished a task by writing 200 lines of code then you will get less marks then a person who writes the same application in 800 lines of code. If you asked me the reason well the reason is simple More Code = More Points.
Conclusion:
First of let me make one thing very clear I am not saying college is a bad thing. YOU MUST GO TO COLLEGE. It all comes down to what you like to do and what you like to learn. When I was in college I never liked to learn the things that they taught maybe that's the reason I did not liked college. But if you like the things which they teach in college then it is a fun place to be.
Also remember whatever you learn in college only 1% of it applies in the real world. The important thing is that you must always do some side reading while in college. I know this sounds very hard since you will be busy with college studies but in the end your independent reading is the one that matters and which makes the difference.