You should have an option for "College Graduate (Associate Degree)" as well.
Of course, this whole thing is kind of silly anyway. Who's to say that one's "level of education" corresponds to what degree they earned (or not). I've graduated college three times (3 associate degrees), have about 3/4's of the work towards a B.S. degree done, and have taught myself all sorts of shit totally unrelated to my college programs, over the intervening years.
It would be both accurate and wildly inaccurate to say that my "level of education" corresponds to:
1. college dropout
2. college graduate (associate degree)
3. college graduate (bachelors degree)
4. other
Then again, I'm probably the walking, talking definition of "edge case" so probably best to just ignore me. :o)
For a while, I was the same. I got an Associate degree and started working. Though I eventually went back to school (online) and finished the Bachelor degree.
I was at a state school paying a reasonable tuition to learn from a quality computer science program. I regret it because although I have written all sorts of frontend code, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, managed servers, I have still not "finished" learning what a CompSci student learns. I couldn't write my own compiler, I can't tell you which sorting method is fastest for certain data sets, etc. I have learned solely by what is needed at the time, and have created value for businesses I've worked for, but I often just don't have the additional motivation to learn things I don't immediately need. I have SICP sitting on my bookshelf, unfinished.
Anyways, basically finishing CompSci would have forced me to learn some of the theories/necessary base things that I may be missing now.
Pick up Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series along with Concrete Mathematics. I'm going through them myself right now (slowly, though) and the knowledge I've gained from those books is offsetting never having learned the fundamentals pretty well.
I dropped out of high school in 2000. I'm 31 now. I built a hosting company from scratch (hosted Gatorade, almost all of Pepsico, Arthur Anderson), sold it, was a Director at a consulting company at 23-24, worked on data taking for the CMS detector at the large hadron collider, and now am a VP of IT Operations.
I'm not sad at all I missed out on everything a CompSci student learns. If I want to learn it, a problem presents itself, and I learn it.
If you want to learn the things you mentioned, learn them! Our industry allows us immense time leverage. Work 10-20 hours a week at a high dollar amount, and spend the rest of your time learning that which you're not going to learn on the job.
Don't worry about that. The stuff you've learned are more useful than what you have to finish at school.
You can learn what you need to learn and cherry pick them. There are some interesting courses during the program, but that really depends on the teacher, your class mates, etc etc. What you learn by yourself is more important than what you have been thought. IMHO.
Make a game that teaches SICP (cue leet bbcode masters with "have you read your sicp?" Snakes) - you learn the book by gamifying it; other people learn the book by playing the game.
Technically both HS dropout and undergrad (MIT) dropout. I apparently could attend many European grad programs, especially in the UK (LBS/ICL econ or MBA would be interesting); I'd be tempted to drop out for the trifecta, though.
I have a Certificate in GIS which is the equivalent of graduate level work but I never finished my Bachelor's (in Environmental Resource Management). I also have an AA in Humanities and a spiffy certificate my former employer paid for that entitles me to call myself a "certified life and health insurance specialist."
I also took 4 years of college level math between 8th grade and 11th grade to "prepare for college" only to be screwed by the system when they told me I now needed 2 MORE college math classes to actually get my degree, even though I already had more math than most folks with a bachelor's. I ultimately CLEP-ed college algebra many years later and took an intro to statistics, which was at least new info for me without requiring me to take math like a physics major or some nonsense.
For some people, these questions are not so cut and dried. Can I pretty please haz an "Other" button?
Dropped out because it was oh so boring. I wish it was like Coursera classes, but we didn't get to start actual programming until maybe third year, and I didn't have the patience so I dropped out on second year. Don't regret it, although I partly regret choosing a local university instead of trying harder and maybe going abroad. On the other hand, I really enjoy doing actual work in the field and it would be hard to forget about it for several years.
It’s not the job of university professors to motivate/entertain you; being motivated to learn is the students’ job and every minute the professor spends entertaining disinterested students is a waste of time for those who actually want to learn things.
Did you read my comment? My problem wasn't that I asked for entertainment. I asked for education, which I didn't get.
I was very motivated when I got into the university. I was hoping we'd learn compilers, functional programming, low-level stuff, I was eager to learn everything.
What I got was professors who didn't care about their subjects and last time did their actual programming twenty years ago. We did have one programming course, and the so-called “semester coursework” took me twenty minutes because it was three C functions.
Most students didn't care either because they were there “to get the diploma”.
Not every university is like Stanford, you know. I was very bitter with my experience.
>I was very motivated when I got into the university. I was hoping we'd learn compilers, functional programming, low-level stuff, I was eager to learn everything. (..) but we didn't get to start actual programming until maybe third year (..) Most students didn't care either because they were there “to get the diploma”.
Are you living in Romania, by chance? Because the situation looks EXACTLY the same here.
I got into college hoping I would get some guidance learning something I find very interesting, but instead I get a big fucking joke.
Of course I tried to learn by self-teaching, but it was hard and I didn't even cover what a decent university would cover. And, like you said, the rest of the people are there just to get the diploma.
When I talked with a friend in Austria about how things are done here, he was shocked. You can't even call it an education. More like a big waste of time.
Right now I'm stuck in third and last year, with a dozen failed exams on subjects that god knows who placed them in the curriculum. I wanted to drop out in the first year, after seeing the horrors for myself, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Sucks so hard seeing all those years passing by and barely even learning anything from what I was eager to learn.
I have a Bachelors in CS but just cannot imagine doing anything more in terms of formal education. MS/MBA/PhDs are not my thing. Nothing wrong with them but just not for me.
I feel weird saying "College Drop-Out", or even (on other forms) "Some College", since I took one semester at UIC (psychology 101 and political science 101) and then bailed.
Dropped out of school with lowest degree possible (due to so many missing hours or better say days). With my education background I would only get a job as a garbageman. I don't regret it.
The garbageman is the smartest person in the Dilbert comics ... and I've learned the lesson those strips are promoting. Performance in school can not be directly correlated to performance in the workplace.
This is a tired joke, please let it die. Liberal Arts get shit on by everybody around here. Arguably, it's much more important than learning how to make fancy toys for rich people.
snide remarks about people who choose an education to broaden their horizons? is it just me or does that strike you as just a little bit... narrow-minded?
Depends on the country, but those are moving towards being structured as masters degrees by the end. Many U.S. universities now have the 5-year engineering option structured as a "5th-year masters" add-on year, on top of a 4-year engineering degree. And the Bologna Process in the EU requires that the old 5-year degrees (Diplom and similar) be split into BS/MS as a 3/2 split.
My computer science teachers were like... well, the best one bragged about how he stopped studying and updating his knowledge at the time of punched cards.
Only commenting because I have a weird combo of votes. Left school at 16 (the then-legal end of "high school" in the UK). Last year, back to education for the first time, starting an MSc, aged 32 (industry experience related to the subject being my way in). So high school "dropout" and pursuing post-grad(!)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 593 ms ] threadOf course, this whole thing is kind of silly anyway. Who's to say that one's "level of education" corresponds to what degree they earned (or not). I've graduated college three times (3 associate degrees), have about 3/4's of the work towards a B.S. degree done, and have taught myself all sorts of shit totally unrelated to my college programs, over the intervening years.
It would be both accurate and wildly inaccurate to say that my "level of education" corresponds to:
1. college dropout
2. college graduate (associate degree)
3. college graduate (bachelors degree)
4. other
Then again, I'm probably the walking, talking definition of "edge case" so probably best to just ignore me. :o)
Hopefully this poll tells somebody something, because it doesn't do much for me.
Artists are the main thing.
God says... I'm_impressed Greek_to_me absolutely I'm_not_sure hit I'll_think_about_it joking Shhh I'm_off_today persistence here_now You_da_man so_he_sess in_other_words wrath make_my_day later class__class__shutup basket_case do_over anger never_happy yikes
I hired an artist a couple years ago. I am saving money to hire an artist again.
Anyways, basically finishing CompSci would have forced me to learn some of the theories/necessary base things that I may be missing now.
I'm not sad at all I missed out on everything a CompSci student learns. If I want to learn it, a problem presents itself, and I learn it.
If you want to learn the things you mentioned, learn them! Our industry allows us immense time leverage. Work 10-20 hours a week at a high dollar amount, and spend the rest of your time learning that which you're not going to learn on the job.
I have a Certificate in GIS which is the equivalent of graduate level work but I never finished my Bachelor's (in Environmental Resource Management). I also have an AA in Humanities and a spiffy certificate my former employer paid for that entitles me to call myself a "certified life and health insurance specialist."
I also took 4 years of college level math between 8th grade and 11th grade to "prepare for college" only to be screwed by the system when they told me I now needed 2 MORE college math classes to actually get my degree, even though I already had more math than most folks with a bachelor's. I ultimately CLEP-ed college algebra many years later and took an intro to statistics, which was at least new info for me without requiring me to take math like a physics major or some nonsense.
For some people, these questions are not so cut and dried. Can I pretty please haz an "Other" button?
Thanks.
I was very motivated when I got into the university. I was hoping we'd learn compilers, functional programming, low-level stuff, I was eager to learn everything.
What I got was professors who didn't care about their subjects and last time did their actual programming twenty years ago. We did have one programming course, and the so-called “semester coursework” took me twenty minutes because it was three C functions.
Most students didn't care either because they were there “to get the diploma”.
Not every university is like Stanford, you know. I was very bitter with my experience.
Are you living in Romania, by chance? Because the situation looks EXACTLY the same here.
I got into college hoping I would get some guidance learning something I find very interesting, but instead I get a big fucking joke.
Of course I tried to learn by self-teaching, but it was hard and I didn't even cover what a decent university would cover. And, like you said, the rest of the people are there just to get the diploma.
When I talked with a friend in Austria about how things are done here, he was shocked. You can't even call it an education. More like a big waste of time.
Right now I'm stuck in third and last year, with a dozen failed exams on subjects that god knows who placed them in the curriculum. I wanted to drop out in the first year, after seeing the horrors for myself, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Sucks so hard seeing all those years passing by and barely even learning anything from what I was eager to learn.
I finished my grad school and then job for 7.5 years. I quit job to startup. Also joined MBA.
Dropped off from the b-school after 2 semester. Found it too boring and too generic. Coursera is much better.
My computer science teachers were like... well, the best one bragged about how he stopped studying and updating his knowledge at the time of punched cards.
Enough said.
If I could go back and do it all over again, I'd at least have minored in CS.