#CollegeTruths #CareerPreparation #CodingSkills #DegreeBenefits
Let’s be honest about college…
🎓 College is great for gaining knowledge and understanding concepts on a deeper level. But when it comes to real-world job skills, it may not be enough on its own.
👩💻 Many of us wish we had learned coding and programming earlier to be more job-ready upon graduation.
💡 One solution could be to take advantage of online resources like coding boot camps, workshops, and tutorials to supplement your college education and boost your practical skills.
What do you think? How did college prepare you for your career, and what could have been done differently to better prepare you for the job market? Let’s discuss! 🚀
Same thing happened with me, but thank god I’m in a better place right now.
And it’s good to have the degree anyways
From what I’ve read and researched. College seems like it’s mainly to help you get an interview. At least for fields that do not involve someone’s life or finances. College is designed to be self studied along with guided practice.
I agree, university has theoretical knowledge but lacks all the practical coding. I think due to the class schedule and other required classes outside of computer science.
So true! Experience and practical skills are key to getting hired.
In my first year of University, I’m going to try and be really involved in the social elements of it. My uni isn’t well-known for Computer Science and has a relatively small (500 students total) computer science pathway. One of the reasons I chose the university is because they have a huge emphasis on student-ran organizations, where any student is able to create one and easily get a decent bit of funding.
Since the CS program is relatively small, so is the student involvement. There are some clubs around it, but they don’t seem too active. However, since overall student involvement is high, this means that there is a degree of demand for computer software or applications for various student organizations. During my orientation, I heard kids complaining about how many snapchat group chats they had to join– which implies that most groups don’t have a central way of communication with their members or the overall student body. It’s largely word-of-mouth and the university forum.
I wasn’t active enough in school to be eligible for any ‘good’ or ‘well-known’ CS uni. So I just kind of have to make my situation work.
Something I thought would be interesting, given the unique opportunity, would be to create cross-platform mobile apps for the student body using React Native. Me being the leader looks really good on future resumes and, if successful, could open a few doors.
I wanted to say this because people often underestimate how impactful being involved can be. You just have to make things work for your situation. I don’t wish to get stuck in the over-competitive job internship or workplace experience market, so I make my own. At the very least, I’ll be able to be involved in a group of like-minded people interested in developing and maintaining university organization applications– which is a spectacular way of learning.
College helps prevent what one of my professors would call “Swiss cheese knowledge,” which is something that happens when you self study without a proper roadmap and you learn a lot of stuff but have strange random holes in your knowledge because nobody told you that x was important to learn or that y exists.
College is there to force you to take all the classes on stuff you would not have thought to learn about on your own, such as low-level systems, functional programming, runtime analysis, operating systems, UML, using a debugger, inclusive design and accessibility, etc.
It may or may not help you get hired, but it will definitely help you be a better programmer
I’ve always viewed comp sci programs in higher education as less about learning to code, and more about learning to problem solve.
I mean, sure, you learn to code. But in my program, it was with a lot of antiquated languages and frameworks. The industry is too fluid for curriculum to keep up.
This is where internships and networking are vital to being successful in the industry, post-grad.
There are some companies that won’t hire without a college degree. It took a while before FAANG companies were willing to hire those who did not have a college degree. When it got started, Google primarily hired those with Masters degrees or higher.
You have to think of CS departments like the math department. They don’t like making a lot of changes. At one point, no one talked about “apps”, but they became a big thing once more people were teaching themselves through online material. Self-taught programmers needed a way to show they could program where CS majors had their grades.
Most programming assignments were about educational aspects, like here’s how a loop works, here’s how functions work, etc. It wasn’t about building a working app. Programming exercises were meant to be completed in two weeks. Maybe upper level courses might take a month.
Take an operating systems course. A good project involves implementing a tiny OS. Is that a project? It’s not a to-do app or something you can show on a webpage. It’s meant to be educational. It’s not a real OS because real OSes are extremely complex, but the core of an OS is (kernel) isn’t so bad.
As trends happen in the software industry, CS departments are not so quick to follow nor change the way they are teaching the courses. People rarely question the applicability of math courses to a job. If you’re really good, you go to grad school, and so the math department seems roughly aimed in that direction.
There are CS departments that don’t do much with web development because it’s not a research area. They’ll usually offer a course, but it’s not the basis of the courses being taught due to the complexity of writing a web app.
The goals of a CS department aren’t to train you to be a software engineer working on Day 1. Students want that, but CS depts aren’t providing that.
College is great but 1) most students probably get like 20% of its potential out of their 4-year subscription and 2) the cost to benefit ratio compared to what you can learn for free is suspect. I have no doubt it’s better, but a 4 year degree at a top university costs like $250k or more.
Too many people look at the purpose of a college degree being to make you an expert in the subject matter.
When I was going to complete my master’s degree I remember I had a freak out moment at the last moment and essentially felt like my thesis research was pointless. My advisor told me this:
– The purpose of a master’s thesis is to contribute to the field of study
– The purpose of a PhD thesis/dissertation is to advance the field of study
Extrapolating to a bachelor’s degree, I would say the purpose is to introduce you to the field of study. It gives you the basic components to be successful in that field, and ensures you are familiar with a wide range of topics that you can apply to a variety of jobs. But you are absolutely expected to continue with learning and training to become proficient in that job.
Are people successful without a degree? Sure. Is a degree required? Probably less so today, although most management still views it as such so it’s hard to get promoted without it. But in my experience, people that did not go to college are often missing some fundamental knowledge, because they became overly focused on learning one specific area. College rounds that out.
If you don’t get an internship/co-op placement, you need to reinforce and supplement your skills with projects. Build a fullstack web app or a game (maybe even an online game, Idk). You need to demonstrate you can build significant and (hopefully) original projects with minimal guidance to boost your odds. Bonus points if you build an app or dev tool that has lots of users. And depending on where you apply, you need to continue brushing up on DSA and modern tech advancements (there’s a whole bunch of new HTML/CSS/JS stuff, for example). Good luck on your journey
Edit1: making legitimate contributions to open-source (ie: ones that get accepted and aren’t just “fixed grammar in docs” or “added comments”) can also help, but it’s hard to get into open-source without connections (or building your own open-source stuff and hoping it blows up), so just focus on expanding and demonstrating your skills in your projects for now
I think a (good) university education isn’t meant to be just a job placement program, but I think a lot of people see it that way.
My opinion is that a good university education should help you become successful in a multitude of situations.
Like, if you just go to a bootcamp and learn the MERN stack, then you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of trouble if all of a suddenly have to work with MySQL and C# or whatever. But someone with a university education should be able to learn whatever technologies they need to use with little or no hand holding.
Yep, college teaches you *how* to learn, but you gotta put in the hours outside of class to actually build stuff and gain real skills. No one’s gonna hand you a job just because you can pass a test.
programming teaches you how to learn.
College is super outdated. I believe one day colleges will be irrelevant and an ancient learning model. Why go to college and dorm up etc spend money on books … if everything is accessible on the internet? Makes no sense..
I had some coworkers who were really proud of the school they studied CS in but meanwhile I have an unrelated degree and there they were working with me.
Yeah I think college classes are a pretty poor environment to learn programming in. Ideally you learn before college, then the classes are easier.
College is what will get you into the door of a company with a non trivial budget. That’s all it’s good for but it’s absolutely crucial for you..
depends entirely on your program and quality of your professors.
i learned the most from an adjunct who had no phd, but instead 40 years of prior industry experience and structured his classes in a way to convey that experience the best he was able to.
i took probably 10 classes directly under him and it was probably closer to an apprenticeship than a traditional CS program.
i had a nicely paying internship and secret clearance as a junior in college. full job offer out of college.