Comment What is college for? (Score 1) 654
> The type of courses I'm taking are essentially useless for getting a job. [snip] Since I'm just
> planning to get a job after I grad, am I in the right program?
A majority of college undergraduates go into the workplace after graduating. This varies somewhat from field to field, but I think it's fairly consistent overall. So compare yourself against these people, whose fields of study range from literature to biology, from sociology to art, and so forth. Their undergraduate education doesn't necessarily have a prescribed path to a professional career. In my opinion, computer science is no different. The only thing that sets it aside in people's minds as a pragmatic and lucrative course of study, as far as I've seen, is the technology economy (though I suspect this was more true in 2000 when I graduated than it is now).
In agreement with your hypothesis, the courses you're taking are likely useless for getting a job, in a strictly literal sense. None of the courses I took, including a fairly intensive class that called itself "software engineering," prepared me for what a career as a software engineer really entails. But I think that opting for a primarily vocational curriculum over a liberal education rooted in theory and emphasizing breadth is extremely myopic, failing to recognize the forest for the trees.
Although you pursue a major course of study in college, the nuts and bolts of the major itself doesn't matter as much as you might think. The real purpose of college, in my opinion, is to teach you to think and to communicate. These are habits and skills that cut across all fields of study and professional careers. In my own experience, I find much of what's required of me as a software engineer has nothing to do with straight heads-down coding, and everything to do with finding creative solutions to complicated architectural problems and arguing their relative merits through clear verbal and written communication. For example, every few months at work, we'll be beating our heads against a problem like "how do we refactor this nasty, duplicated code so that we can both share it, and how can we get it done in a way that meets our schedule requirements?" Or better, "product marketing has just given us a new feature requirement that forces us to reset our assumptions and our schedule, how can we compromise?" I find myself writing essays at work to address questions like this, and I think I'd find myself frustrated and ill-equipped for the task if I hadn't taken all those "useless" classes in college.
My advice is to convince yourself that, although some of the courses you take in college might turn out to be practical in a job, college is not for getting you a job. Take the courses that most interest you, and take them for their own intrinsic merits, not for their relative merit in helping you achieve the short term goal of finding a first job. To help kickstart your professional development, you should be looking for summer internships instead. That will help get you the skills and connections you need to find your first full-time job. And don't forget: your education doesn't end when you graduate.
> planning to get a job after I grad, am I in the right program?
A majority of college undergraduates go into the workplace after graduating. This varies somewhat from field to field, but I think it's fairly consistent overall. So compare yourself against these people, whose fields of study range from literature to biology, from sociology to art, and so forth. Their undergraduate education doesn't necessarily have a prescribed path to a professional career. In my opinion, computer science is no different. The only thing that sets it aside in people's minds as a pragmatic and lucrative course of study, as far as I've seen, is the technology economy (though I suspect this was more true in 2000 when I graduated than it is now).
In agreement with your hypothesis, the courses you're taking are likely useless for getting a job, in a strictly literal sense. None of the courses I took, including a fairly intensive class that called itself "software engineering," prepared me for what a career as a software engineer really entails. But I think that opting for a primarily vocational curriculum over a liberal education rooted in theory and emphasizing breadth is extremely myopic, failing to recognize the forest for the trees.
Although you pursue a major course of study in college, the nuts and bolts of the major itself doesn't matter as much as you might think. The real purpose of college, in my opinion, is to teach you to think and to communicate. These are habits and skills that cut across all fields of study and professional careers. In my own experience, I find much of what's required of me as a software engineer has nothing to do with straight heads-down coding, and everything to do with finding creative solutions to complicated architectural problems and arguing their relative merits through clear verbal and written communication. For example, every few months at work, we'll be beating our heads against a problem like "how do we refactor this nasty, duplicated code so that we can both share it, and how can we get it done in a way that meets our schedule requirements?" Or better, "product marketing has just given us a new feature requirement that forces us to reset our assumptions and our schedule, how can we compromise?" I find myself writing essays at work to address questions like this, and I think I'd find myself frustrated and ill-equipped for the task if I hadn't taken all those "useless" classes in college.
My advice is to convince yourself that, although some of the courses you take in college might turn out to be practical in a job, college is not for getting you a job. Take the courses that most interest you, and take them for their own intrinsic merits, not for their relative merit in helping you achieve the short term goal of finding a first job. To help kickstart your professional development, you should be looking for summer internships instead. That will help get you the skills and connections you need to find your first full-time job. And don't forget: your education doesn't end when you graduate.
