College Ramblings…
My Bachelors Degree in Computer Science
(I have a bunch of posts I have started but not finished. So I’m going to start posting them. Some of them may not best, but I’d like to get them cleared out. Here’s my oldest post – draft dated 10/16/2007, finishing it up today.)
Please Note: This is a rambling.
So I have my Bachelors degree in Computer Science. This is great, but my thoughts about it really boil down to this: big deal. I have learned a decent amount throughout college in regard to my major, no doubt about it. But I believe I have missed many more opportunities in the process such as:
- (Indie) Software development
- Other Business – this is sort of a big list
I really have not progressed in my knowledge of OS X specific development, even though I finished my BS 1.5 years ago. I can blame many, many things for this, and a post about this is coming up soon. The biggest loss here I think is lost experience-time on the platform. If I am not able to make it on my own with OS X software development, I’d at least like to work for a Mac software company. I have done some development on Windows, but at school and at EMC I work exclusively on Linux. In terms of business development, I’ve made only moderate gains where I believe larger gains should be possible, as well as let a few entire business ideas not see the light of day because “I don’t have time”.
My biggest gains from going to college:
- Friends/Contacts
- Ideas
- Some maturation(I’ve been told this is disputable though)
- It was fun… Lots of fun
- I learned a few things too
I don’t plan to expand on this too much. I am happy I went to college, and to have earned my degree. That being said, I just sometimes wish I had been able to spend my time on other things. I believe many of the required courses outside of my major were a HUGE waste of my time. You can give me the “it makes you a well rounded person” BS all you want, but I believe a dedicated course on “Software Engineering” or “Debugging and Performance Optimization”, beats out “Philosophy in Film” in terms of usefulness by a nearly infinite amount. Or how about a course I would have loved: “Mac OS X Software Development” – I tried to do this as a directed study for a project sequence in late 2007, alas the proposal fell on deaf ears and I instead went with “Internet and Web Systems” (read: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you know things I had been doing since I was 13).
Yada, Yada, Yada
The experiences and friends gained throughout my college years are priceless to me (Should I count the student loans?) – and having the degree looks good on the resume if I need it. I hope I don’t though, I don’t believe that I am meant to be a 40+hr/week worker. I love running my own business(es) and hope to continue to do so. I look forward to sharing my escapades in starting a few new ones with everyone this year. Here’s to 2009.
