What university is all about...
Nicely phrased by this guy's comment in Slashdot.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125915&cid=10546997
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful) by bitingduck (810730) on Saturday October 16, @06:49PM (#10546997)
Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.College isn't a trade school, and you shouldn't treat it that way. The most important thing you learn in college is how to learn. In many, if not most, fields what you learn in college is outdated by the time you finish (if it wasn't when you started) but it does (or should) give you a strong background from which to learn other things. In graduate school you learn how to learn things that nobody knows yet.As an example, an undergraduate physics degree from a pretty decent school will get you to about the mid-1950s as far as physics knowledge, with a few little tastes of stuff from the 70s(and maybe even the present, if you work in someone's lab). You can fake your way into a lot of engineering jobs from there, and if you go to graduate school, you catch up to maybe the 70s (or even 80s and 90s) in a lot of areas, and you take one small piece of physics right up to the present day and become a world expert on it, adding new knowledge at the leading edge. All the stuff you learn along the way provides important context and background knowledge, but the most important thing you learn is how to obtain new knowledge. If you need any of that stuff that you didn't have time to learn (because the field has gotten very large) you at least get the tools to go back and catch up quickly. Computer Engineering has to be much the same, if not more so, since things are changing even faster than in physics.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125915&cid=10546997
Re:great news! (Score:5, Insightful) by bitingduck (810730) on Saturday October 16, @06:49PM (#10546997)
Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.College isn't a trade school, and you shouldn't treat it that way. The most important thing you learn in college is how to learn. In many, if not most, fields what you learn in college is outdated by the time you finish (if it wasn't when you started) but it does (or should) give you a strong background from which to learn other things. In graduate school you learn how to learn things that nobody knows yet.As an example, an undergraduate physics degree from a pretty decent school will get you to about the mid-1950s as far as physics knowledge, with a few little tastes of stuff from the 70s(and maybe even the present, if you work in someone's lab). You can fake your way into a lot of engineering jobs from there, and if you go to graduate school, you catch up to maybe the 70s (or even 80s and 90s) in a lot of areas, and you take one small piece of physics right up to the present day and become a world expert on it, adding new knowledge at the leading edge. All the stuff you learn along the way provides important context and background knowledge, but the most important thing you learn is how to obtain new knowledge. If you need any of that stuff that you didn't have time to learn (because the field has gotten very large) you at least get the tools to go back and catch up quickly. Computer Engineering has to be much the same, if not more so, since things are changing even faster than in physics.
posted by Rivendell at 10:51 AM
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