[Inspired by nslay's discussion on college in "Story of a Professional Cheater"]
For those who have completed their college education, how do you look back on it? What are you glad of, and what are your regrets? What did you major in? Do you wish you had majored in something else?
For me, I studied English literature, and I have three more quarters after this one until I graduate. As I look back, I don't know whether I should have majored in comp sci. The jobs I will be seeking will be "computer jobs", whether they be software dev., systems admin or IT. (I currently work a job in IT with a touch of admin. and software dev.) And it would have really given me a leg up to major in comp sci. At the same time, I majored in English because I wanted to do something different, and because I really do prefer to learn comp sci on my own, individually, so that it's like slowly uncovering a mystery.
I know that Myndfyre majored in poli sci / psychology. Myndfyre, are you glad that you did that? Do you have any regrets? They are not exactly the degrees that a software company are looking for in programmers, but at the same time you seem to be very successful and employable as a software engineer.
Like you said, I double-majored in poli sci and psychology. I do have some regrets and some not. I wish I had gone on to take DiffEq and Linear Algebra, but that's not too bad. I still remember calc 3 pretty well, 7 years later. Overwhelmingly, though, I would say that I like my liberal arts education because it forced me to write, a lot. I have a strong hankering that if I had stayed confined to the CS department at ASU, I would not be as good a writer as I am today.
By the time I finished college, I had done a lot of work with C between porting things like MBNCSUtil and reinterpreting the code for MaNGOS (the WoW emulator) so that I could write a client for WoW, and so I have a pretty effective and mixed skillset. That said, I haven't been able to find a job outside of C#, probably because there aren't jobs like that in Arizona.
I absolutely loved a couple of the classes I had in CS. When I did "Digital Design Fundamentals," a class similar to one Newby is currently taking, it was my first semester. I think it is still my favorite class. But, the reason I quit the CS program is, quite frankly, it sucks at ASU.
I went back for a year to grad school in Software Engineering. It was the same department and there were elective classes. I took an Operating Systems class, and I knew literally everything in the class except for virtual memory paging by the time I got there. But if you look at how
they taught synchronization while I was there, I can see why, when I hired a kid out of school, he didn't know how to do anything practical when he graduated. Of course, I'm not the
first one to strongly condemn universities for how they teach the practices in computing.
My biggest regret is that I can't convince myself and suck it up to go do it, and I think that, for the most part, I now miss out on some jobs that I would really love, like those in games. Maybe that's untrue. Maybe it's that my current salary is way too high and game companies won't pay that much. I don't know.
All told, I loved the college experience. I wasn't a partier - I worked hard and had a lot of fun with friends. Many employers tell me that they look more for my ability to commit to doing something long-term than for the actual program of study. That said, I don't know where my theory about game businesses and stuff factors in.
