31–40 of 103 posts
You will learn more from it than just the courses & modules you take so keep that in consideration.
I'm not sure where you're physically located, but if you were a young cousin of mine on either the US or Japanese sides of the family, I'd tell you get the degree. If you feel that college is too easy mode for you, feel free to take more difficult or eclectic courses, or throw yourself into extracurriculars. (It's a great time to learn a foreign language.) Why get the degree? 1) Because there is no circumstance where…
Thank you for your response! I'm living in Eastern Europe, Romania; not exactly a tech hub, which is why the college level is so low :/ Most of what I've learned is from free available resources (books, lectures, you name it) Thanks for the points on why I should get the degree, they make sense!
My advice would be to take advantage of all the things that you can do in college and that are harder to do outside. Remember that being in a college is more than lectures, you also have a lot of resources at hand that are very expensive outside.
The final note is that a comp sci degree (or analogous) is more than just programming, for instance if you would like to explore things like machine learning, physics simulation, and whatnot you would appreciate to have a solid math background (college level). It is up to you, you might be just fine without college like Gates and Zuckerberg, but there are also plenty of counterparts who were not that lucky without a college degree.
This is the kind of post that usually attracts a LOT of replies, many of them quite good. But knowing that you're about to have a lot of reading to do, I'm going to try to keep this very short. You alone are responsible for your career advancement. Don't expect a company to lay out a fulfilling career path for you. If you are unsatisfied, ask for more. If you can't get it at your current job, get a new one. Dropping…
> The big problem is that everyone is trying to make me feel bad about this
You are threatening their identity. A degree is consider the holy grail.
I'm not sure where you're physically located, but if you were a young cousin of mine on either the US or Japanese sides of the family, I'd tell you get the degree. If you feel that college is too easy mode for you, feel free to take more difficult or eclectic courses, or throw yourself into extracurriculars. (It's a great time to learn a foreign language.) Why get the degree? 1) Because there is no circumstance where…
I dropped out from a university program (non-US citizen, we don't have colleges as you guys do), because I felt it didn't give me enough compared to paid work. However, I regularly wish I stayed for my degree - not because I have a hard time finding employers, but because I actually feel like I'm missing some education. There are many courses which I would love to have read to the end, from mathematics to algorithm theory and finite automata.
I'm not sure where you're physically located, but if you were a young cousin of mine on either the US or Japanese sides of the family, I'd tell you get the degree. If you feel that college is too easy mode for you, feel free to take more difficult or eclectic courses, or throw yourself into extracurriculars. (It's a great time to learn a foreign language.) Why get the degree? 1) Because there is no circumstance where…
Thank you for your response! I'm living in Eastern Europe, Romania; not exactly a tech hub, which is why the college level is so low :/ Most of what I've learned is from free available resources (books, lectures, you name it) Thanks for the points on why I should get the degree, they make sense!
You sound like the kind of person who probably sailed through high school and likely has great exam results from there. Combined with the fact that you've got tonnes of experience and have taught yourself, you'd have a great shot at studying somewhere abroad, if you think you'd like to do it. I learned a lot online and from working on open-source projects, but for me personally, formally studying computing has broadened my horizons massively and opened a huge number of doors.
The key thing that made college worth it for me though was two things a) finding people of similar interests to work on cool things and b) figuring out how to work with others.
I don't know where you live, but I can tell you what you can do in America degree wise. There are options for accelerating university. Discussing your situation with your advisor may help you get some credits via a special test or the the CLEP and AP exams. There are actually a lot of resources for getting credits, you just need to ask your advisor for help. Maybe they will even accept coursera work. The flip side is…