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I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

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Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#191

Post by gems »

munin wrote: post #190
gems wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The point was "there is a standard of rigor that you don't experience at every school". I could have used anything as an example. It doesn't matter that I picked community college. If you agree with that statement, then do you disagree with the conclusion: that once you go down that path, you the student, have a burden to explain to everyone how the quality of education compares with the best? Technically, yeah, I…

I'm not sure about "cheaper schooling, lower quality". In engineering and computer science there are state schools that compete, IMO, pretty handily with "the best". you might snigger and scoff, but hiring managers at good companies don't. also, if you start your degree at a CC and transfer to a 4 year to finish, what does it says on your diploma? exactly what it would say if you went there for four years. I wouldn't…

yeah, so, I was rushing. I edited the previous post: what matters is all the things that go along with cheaper schooling, not that fact that it's cheap.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#192

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #176
NamTaf wrote: post #101

The US university loan system is fucked. We have a government-run loan scheme called HECS. You defer your university fees throughout the duration of your studies, apparently no matter how long they last. The programme is not means tested at all, so it is available for every single domestic student studying uni here, no matter what. That loan is then paid back only once you start earning more than a threshold amount o…

> The major criticism of the system is that students can just incur this debt then flee the country. That would be the big roadblock to implementing something like that in the US. In the US, when evaluating whether or not to do (or continue) some program that provides aid or assistance, there are a lot of people who focus primarily on whether or not it is possible to cheat the system. It doesn't matter to them if 99…

[deleted]

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#193

Post by emikulic »

danjayh wrote: post #164
dools wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another advantage to paying full fees (and criticism of the HECS system) is that the score required to get into most courses is lower for full fee paying students. This is simply because there is less competition for those places but it does essentially mean that stupid rich kids can get into uni ahead of poor kids who are less stupid. And not only do we have HECS, but we have Youth Allowance which gives you money wh…

So you freely admit that most students defraud the system, yet you still consider it the case that it "works out pretty well"?

I think you just proved tzs's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6177335

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#194

Post by Peteris »

gems wrote: post #172
graycat wrote: post #155

Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…

You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…

This is false. I studied Maths at Cambridge and learned some courses completely on my own.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#195

Post by gems »

Peteris wrote: post #194
gems wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…

This is false. I studied Maths at Cambridge and learned some courses completely on my own.

It's false that any of what I said can be true for some (or many) students? How do you determine if you're one of those students?

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#197

Post by whatusername »

lysium wrote: post #181
NamTaf wrote: post #101

The US university loan system is fucked. We have a government-run loan scheme called HECS. You defer your university fees throughout the duration of your studies, apparently no matter how long they last. The programme is not means tested at all, so it is available for every single domestic student studying uni here, no matter what. That loan is then paid back only once you start earning more than a threshold amount o…

I don't see how HECS is a lot better than the US system. "Poor" people still have to pay 10% (accumulated) interest on the loan (it does not matter if the interest is called 'discount') and you still leave the system with a loan of $18-30k. If a country wants to advance technologically or academically, it should have cost-free universities like there are cost-free schools. Why do people not understand that?

Does it help that the 10% discount is going away in 6 months time? http://studyassist.gov.au/sites/studyassist/news/pages/chang...

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#198

Post by learc83 »

e2e4 wrote: post #177
graycat wrote: post #155

Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…

> And from the famous Ivy League schools, it's generally easier to get accepted for a Ph.D. than for a Bachelors. Since in many cases PhD is basically free, it is by far more competitive than Bachelors.

>Since in many cases PhD is basically free

In many cases an Ivy League Bachelors is basically free as well.

Between tuition waivers for lower income students, and parents paying for higher income students, an Ivy League Bachelors is effectively free to most of the time.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#199

Post by jinfiesto »

Peteris wrote: post #194
gems wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…

This is false. I studied Maths at Cambridge and learned some courses completely on my own.

Seconded. Math is one of the most easily self teachable subjects. The field of study is objects of mind (unless you're a platonist.) Literally no materials required except pen/paper, a brain and maybe a straightedge and compass. The point of math is not to do endless worked exercises. It's to understand mathematical objects and prove interesting things about them. You can generate unlimited problems for yourself by investigating some mathematical object at random.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#200

Post by stiff »

gems wrote: post #172
graycat wrote: post #155

Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…

You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…

I self-studied some amount of pure mathematics, having only an undergraduate CS degree and while having a 40 hour a week day job, and while it's definitely harder and slower than learning it at a university, it's not unrealistic. If you look hard enough, there are books with proof-based exercises with answers in the back (example proofs) that you can use to check your understanding (Spivak's Calculus, books from Springer UTM series). For many other books, you can find course pages online with homeworks+solutions, e.g.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~oholtz/teaching.html

has homeworks for Rudins "Principles of Mathematical Analysis", and Halmos "Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces". Finally most problem books (again Springer has a nice selection) have very detailed solutions. Yes, there are proofs that can be done in a number of different ways, but in my experience diverging too far is not very common and in most cases some core ingredients have to make it in in the end anyway. It's impossible to go through a lot of exercises "writing complete nonsense solutions" like that, when you are precisely checking your solutions against the given ones. For many types of exercises there are also simple ways of validating your solution, for example, in probability theory you can often do a computer simulation. In the end that's what anyway has to be done in real world and in research work.

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