adrienne on Warpcast

adrienne pfp

Has anyone here taken any of the free online college courses offered thru MIT, Stanford, Coursera etc? I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering and spent my professional career in Software Engineering and general business/management. In the coming year I’m going to have a little more free personal time and I’m considering trying one of these courses and curious to hear anyone’s experience. I’ve done lots of continuous learning over the years- reading blogs and books, listening to talks, plus some formal professional training - but all of a sudden I’m yearning for a classroom and more structured curriculum. The only question I have is whether to do computer science (to satisfy my desire to know the difference between on the job learning and what is being taught) or humanities (because I missed out in college).

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Leeward Bound pfp

my hot take - college level compsci is mostly worthless for the majority of people, probably even *worse* for you with your existing background just take a udemy course and build a small app, you'll be lightyears ahead of most recent grads imho i would do humanities, sounds more interesting and fulfilling

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alex pfp

@alexgrover.eth

Depends on the goal IMO - to build real stuff I’d mostly agree, but if the idea is to learn what’s being taught in school I think college classes are actually pretty useful. No substitute for job experience, but learning how the internet and databases work are pretty helpful in general

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adrienne pfp

Right. I know how to use the internet, design database schemas, interact with them programmatically, tune stored procedures, etc but maybe I would enjoy the intellectual pursuit of learning about their foundations, on a conceptual level? Or maybe not 🤷‍♀️

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Leeward Bound pfp

shits probably (hopefully?) gotten better since i was in school (06-07), but at the time, michigan state was teaching us: processor design and opcodes, data structures in c (trees, linked lists), algorithms (100 different ways to sort a list or reorganize a tree) one day i asked my counselor "when will we learn to connect to a DB and insert data, or build a rest api" (which i had already been doing for years) and they said "never", so i dropped out the next week all of this knowledge has been useful only in job interviews, literally never applied a single thing i got from college i think *some* modern curriculums might have more emphasis on modern techniques, but i definitely know many schools are still teaching the same stuff. probably best to review what they plan to teach you and decide for yourself, i wish i did.

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