Felix' Ramblings Felix' RamblingsI recently got the simple question of how the years I spent at university changed me. Like a well adjusted human being, I responded to a question consisting of eight words by writing several paragraphs about my expectations, the reality, university vs school and so on.
I'm going to borrow from that schizopost and try to summarize my thoughts on this in a (somewhat) more organized fassion, as I have thought about this a bunch.
I was roughly 18 years old when I signed up for a Computer Science Bachelors Degree at a rather large german university. And at the time, I was looking forward to it. School contained a lot of subjects I did not care about, and this rather common experience feels like a vicious circle: People don't want to attend classes or engage with the subject. People talk more among themselves or disrupt the lesson, which usually disturbs the rest of the class, which is annoying and makes me not want to attend the lesson, and so on [0].
Back then I was already pretty introverted / antisocial. Surprisingly, this got me on the good site of some teachers: If you are part of the smaller group of people who just shut up and try to finish up the assigned work, you leave a better impression than other students who are disrupting the lesson.
So I imagined that a lot of things would change in university. After all, my fellow university students chose to study Computer Science as well. While I was one of the computer nerds in my grade, university is probably full of people like me. That should get me out of my shell: Lots of nerds / like-minded people, probably with at least some shared interest in computers or programming. No more awkward group assignments; instead people are doing their share of work. The lectures, even if dry, should be related to the practice of programming, right?
Sadly, very little of that was true.
Most lectures weren't interesting to me. To say that the courses were dry would be an understatement: It feels like the practical parts, especially in the beginning, were rushed through. As if learning about the programming paradigm and the syntax of the language is all there is.
At times, it felt like the professors were going out of their way to make their lectures as unapplicable as possible. Imagine my frustration when I tinkered around with OpenGL, only to find the same matrices and space transformations which are found in linear algebra. Why not link these things together? Every 3D application extensively relies on linear algebra! Closing the gap between theory and practice cannot be more obvious. And hell, the visualization would have been more than helpful! [1]
I chose the module compiler construction. The idea of creating a small programming language, or even just parts of it, sounds awesome! But nope, we never did a lot of code. We primarily """learned""" to """write""" (or rather define) a compiler mathematically. I left that course roughly as knowledgable as I went into it; nothing an afternoon of Wikipedia couldn't achieve.
I also didn't become more extroverted / social, it was quite the opposite. I became even more of a hermit than during school. I had one or two university friends (one of which I still keep in touch with) - that's it. It's not like wasn't able to socialize; but clearly, my guess that I'd magically become more extroverted fell flat. When you are not forced to interact with people, I sure as fuck don't choose to start conversations.
For a while, I was wondering where the fuck I would end up in 10 years or something. Not from the perspective of a job or anything, I mean just the social aspect. Most of the friends of my parents are people which my mother met during university. In contrast, I went out of university with 1 person I keep in touch with. But to be clear: That guy is awesome. We did, whenever possible, all of our assignments together, shared our notes and prep-work for exams, and so on. Even if one of us was slacking in one subject, we'd usually make up for it by focussing on the homework of another one.
That one friend for group assignments was crucial, because here's something we both realized far too late: The productive work groups are formed in the first semester, and they are likely to stick together afterwards. The people which switch groups are, a lot of the time, the types of people which you don't want to have in your group assignments. That part we all know of from school doesn't change. Not after the first semester(s) where people are filtered. Not at to the end of the Bachelor's Degree. Not even in your masters or PhD studies, from what I gather from friends and relatives. There will always be people like that.
In school, keeping up with the course is often just paying attention to the lessons at hand. For very easy courses, that stays the same. For a lot of harder courses, this doesn't hold up. At all.
If you attend a large university like I did, the professor doesn't know you. They don't give a shit if you don't attend the lesson. It's not their fucking problem. A lot of the times, even the homework was voluntary. I like this "no bullshit" attitude: You're responsible with keeping up, in whatever way you see fit. Good luck.
Here's another experience you will hear a lot: If you didn't struggle with school, you will likely get fucked in the first semester of university, because the little effort you put in during school, sure as fuck doesn't fly here [2]. I screwed up my first semester, as many friends / of mine did. Hell, my 6 semesters degree took me 10 semesters.
And noone cares.
Failing like that is/was, I think, a pretty important experience to me. Struggling to make progress, to structure things on your own, to be confronted with your own lack of discipline, failing due to noone's fault but your own.
My parents always had my back, and supported me in every way imaginable. That still didn't stop me from thinking that I was a complete failure at times. Or the rare stressful evenings of the Bachelor's Thesis at some point - wowie, I cannot recall another instance where I was freaked out like that, even though I knew: All I had to do was pass, which is really difficult to fail if you put at least some amount of time into it.
I'm not sure how much I changed in terms of productivity. I'm still slacking a lot and making less progress than I'd like (as if I have written about this before, curious). But my attitude to / perspective of these things have changed drastically, I think. It's as obvious as ever that the situation of was in was anything but dire. There was no reason to freak out. Even if it feels like the world is coming down hard, it's probably fine.
One of the slightly scary lessons I learned is the importance of networking. A single person was responsible for 40%-60% of the practicals I did during university. If it wasn't for her, a large part of the more interesting part of university would have been missing.
Here's a summary:
Ironically enough, if you only know the name of the academic chair this all happened at, you'd think that this was the most dry shit ever. While these weren't the only times were we programmed for some university stuff, it definitely was like half of it. If it wasn't for said person, my whole university experience might have been significantly worse.
The one part I miss about university is the amount of "free time" you have. I write "free time", as I was (and still am) absolutely dogshit at scheduling me shit properly. This led to me feeling like I never can relax completely, like there is always some shit I should be studying / learning for / etc. But I believe that this amount of time one is free to schedule was crucial for some self-reflection.
In contrast with my current fulltime job, it's nice to know how many hours you have to work for in the day. Once that timer is up, you are free to relax. I'm aware that I could have treated university like a job as well, but I lacked the discipline (and probably still do). It's also nice to know that every task at work, regardless of how stupid the problem is, is actually some task that people want to have completed, one way or another. That's a huge motivation-boost in comparison to some of the university exams, with answers that could have been found on the internet or my notes, if only I had access to it.
I learned a lot about myself during university. I got confronted with a lot of my shortcomings. I learned about what motivates me: For me, the same course material can be anything between "boring as fuck" and "super interesting", just depending on the context and applicability.
There's probably a lot more which I could write about. I guess that shouldn't really surprise me, given that it was ~5 years of my life. There was also the covid-semesters, which was an interesting experience on its own, but now that I see how much I ended up typing in my text editor, I think this is a good moment to stop for the time being.
[0]: To be fair, the science-y classes have been nice, because the class size was quiet small, and I got very lucky with the teachers I was assigned to.
[1]: Shout out to a relative of mine, who recommended me a playlist of 3Blue1Brown. An afternoon of videos taught me more than an entire semester + me retaking the course.
[2]: Assuming your courses aren't piss easy. Again, that's just my experience. The university has the reputation to be fairly difficult, which supposedly helps finding job later on.
[3]: But not due to the quality of our bot; that one was dumb as fuck and ended up in the lower half of the tournament.
Felix' Ramblings