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I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

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Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#21

Post by eddieroger »

nmjohn wrote: post #17
kyllo wrote: post #5

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for t…

You articulated perfectly exactly what I was thinking. I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false. It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end. > Besides, if you're not doing a…

It'd be really interesting to go back and see when people started to shift towards colleges being a training ground and not the typical apprenticeship path that was the real training for generations. The way you learned to be an electrician was by being someone's apprentice, then working your way up the ranks, and this went for nearly all trade industries that I can think of. This statement has come to sound incredibly pompous (and I genuinely don't mean for it to), but college isn't for everyone, and it shouldn't be the only road to a successful life and career.

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#24

Post by BruceIV »

kyllo wrote: post #5

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for t…

Agreed. I think a better solution to the article author's problem would be to treat 'programming' education (which is not the same thing as computer science) like a skilled trade like carpentry or plumbing, and intersperse community college courses with a formalized apprenticeship program ... it might take a while to get some traction, but it seems like it would work as a way to train programmers while not gutting our ability to do blue-sky theoretical research in computer science.

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#25

Post by cowsandmilk »

Author claims to have studied engineering, but seems to be absolutely unaware of co-op programs which almost all engineering schools have. Some, like Northeastern University, even require you to do a co-op[1]. I've worked with Northeastern students at pharma companies and they dive into the belly of the beast when they they spend six months at a company. Often, they become so integral, they get hired after they graduate to keep doing what they did during their co-op.

Or an alternative model, going back to 1916, is MIT's Practice school[2], where graduate students go into factories and apply their training on specific projects.

This reads largely like someone who is ignorant of the opportunities that were probably present at Penn State, assuming that a degree would just get him a job.

[1] http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ [2] http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#26

Post by wvenable »

GlennCSmith wrote: post #2

Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!

I went to a good school for computing science and I know I graduated with a few people who couldn't program. They had no intention of programming in their career which is good because in 4th year they were producing awful spaghetti code.

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#28

Post by jerf »

kyllo wrote: post #5

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for t…

"Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers."

Maybe it's a crazy idea, but they are equally not intended to be places where you go and learn nothing of value to anybody.

I mean, I get the whole academic focus thing too, but the described education wasn't focused on academic computer science either. It was simply useless.

Moreover, the idea that academics can be so strictly partitioned from practice is a rather silly one as well, at least in the computer science world. A program that claimed to be turning out really good computer scientists that, mysteriously, are incapable of actually driving a computer to do anything useful to anybody (academic or industry), would not be one that I would be paying much attention to. Even computer science academics are, on occasion, expected to be able to write an actual program every once in a while.

And I certainly won't believe anyone who claims to be really experienced at, say, using multithreaded programming, because they sat through a couple of classes and did a couple of homework assignments that didn't involve coding anything. It's really easy to think you know something, until you actually try to do it, and end up spending 15 hours debugging a terrible race condition. Which turns out to be something really, really simple in the end, and the real problem was that your "academic" knowledge still needed to be hardened with real-world experience.

And I'd observe that fully connects back to academia... it's the people who have actually tried things and used things and have some sort of real experience who will be pushing the boundaries forward, not some sort of semi-mystical "pure academics".

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#29

Post by 2mur »

robotresearcher wrote: post #20
kyllo wrote: post #5

"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?" Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for t…

"universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers" The professional vocational degrees like engineering, medicine and law are intended exactly for career training. They are usually certified by practitioner guilds, for example. You are quite right about computer science, but that is not a vocational professional program. The OP studied engineering. (edit: reading down a bit, someone spotte…

I can't speak for law school.

Medical school is absolutely not career training. It simply gives you the knowledge and vocabulary so that you can be trained to be doctor. The additional training, of course, happens in your residency.

You are utterly unprepared to truly be a physician when you graduate medical school, even if you have earned the right to be called 'doctor.'

Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job

#30

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

throwaway283719 wrote: post #4

You might get the impression that the author studied engineering (" I studied engineering, not English... ") or perhaps computer science (" ...graduated at the top of my class in computer science... ") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light…

According to his LinkedIn[0] he doesn't even list any of the tell tale indicators of being a programmer/engineer/etc. No GitHub/BitBucket/etc, no descriptions of code projects worked on, etc. But hey, he does have "Direct Mail" as a skill!

[0] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/casey-ark/23/194/668

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