Michele’s Freeminding

Continuing on my quest for rant-Nirvana, here’s another rant. This time — and not for the first time –, I’m focusing on university.

As previously stated on this very blog, I feel university is pretty much useless — and mind you I’m referring to my field: computer engineering, but it could be easily applied to most fields –, unless you’re in it just for the piece of paper, which is what most people are in for, and which could be deemed as the culprit for university’s dullness.

The more I keep going to classes and doing exams, the more I realize how this is not helping me a lot.
There are people around me who are saying me university helps you open your mind, it teaches you how to have a method, but I can’t see it. How can I be taught something by mediocre professors that hardly seem to know what’s going on in the real World? most of the time they seem to be teaching for the sake of it, simply because they have to do it.
I happened to have a couple of good professors and I could really tell the difference, but the rest, don’t even get me started.

I don’t feel the need for the piece of paper, mainly for one reason: I’d rather starve doing my own thing than make a living of off someone else’s creature.
It might be a bad thing for me, but I can’t see myself being employed somewhere. As I said, I’d prefer being self-employed/running my own company and earning X/2 rather than working in some company I’ve got no say over and earning X*2 plus some stock options on the side. I’d feel nullified.
I’m no 9/5 guy — I can even do 7am/2am if I truly believe in what I’m doing — so I can’t imagine being seated at a desk doing some work I don’t care about and having to report to some obnoxious VP, or whatever.

Probably the best reason to go to university — I’m always talking about my field of study — is for networking, but that’s not true for every single university outthere.
Sure, if you go to Stanford, you’ll easily meet some smart guys who will probably end up making it big. But if you go to an average university, it’s a bit harder, there might be smart guys — haven’t met that many, myself, maybe one? –, but probably most will end up working in some big corp, maybe even becoming VP of put-serious-sounding-department-name-with-not-much-real-responsibilty-though-here, but that’ll be it, not much more. You won’t meet the next Larry & Sergey.

There are a few things I’d like to do in university, but none related to my field. For example, I love religions, even though I’m an atheist myself, so I’d like to get a Theology degree in the future. And this is just an example.

In the end, if you’re a smart and resourceful person, there’s not much a Computer Science (or similar) degree can give you, it might even get in your way. Why? because it might teach you to have a closed mentality — which is exactly the opposite of what, in my humble opinion, getting into university should do.

Guess I’m a bit frustrated, ha? ;)

This post was written 1 year, 4 months ago on April 21st, 2007 early evening.