A thought on studying on Michele’s Freeminding

A thought on studying

2005.10.17

Yesterday I realized something that’s a real bummer for me. I have many hobbies and interests and I love to read books and practice them to improve my knowledge.
But I can’t help doing the same thing if I have to.

Let me explain it: I’m studying Computer Engineering and find it difficult to sit down and study for a course I’m attending. But at the same time I can sit down and read a book about PHP/Ruby/CSS/whatever anytime.

Another example is photography. I love to go out and snap pictures, and read books — even very technical ones — about it. But I’m sure I couldn’t attend a photography course.
So, what’s the problem?

I think it has to do with me not being longing for someone to tell me what I have to do and then tell me if I’m doing it right.
I mean, I’d gladly have Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson teach me about photography, but not somebody else.

I’d a bit conceited if I thought nobody could teach me something, indeed I’m not thinking it. Simply, I don’t like to have someone tell me what I have to do to learn something: I’m for a hands on and independent approach on things.

How do you feel about this? Do you get what my point is?

This post was written 3 years, 2 months ago on October 17th, 2005 lunch time.

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Vincent
3 years, 2 months ago

I am asking myself this question day after day. I have Computer Science courses 5 days/week and I am always wondering what am I doing there. I think my problem is that I also have a job in the same field which is really exciting where I create web applications for translators and where I am meeting customers, managing a project, planning large-scale deployment, etc. When it gets to school courses, I just don’t feel at the right place with a theoric professor teaching theoric things to students who still don’t know (after 3 years of a software engineering cursus) what a web server is while many discovered what HTML is about last week. Their biggest concern may be C++ pointers and memory deallocation on a virtual destructor. They have absolutely no opinion: what is good is what teachers said was good. This is a bummer. Is it supposedly even more theoric in Europe, I wonder what that may look like.

I still need to get a diploma to get an official recognition of these 4 lost years which is somewhat valuable from an employer’s point of view.

Speaking of books, what I enjoy the most these days, even after a full day of CS, is to read a book called “PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice” which gives me ideas instead of clumsy theory. I love PHP and Ruby on Rails because they are real artistic languages. At the end maybe that is what we prefer: art. And you can’t learn art in school.

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