What is a university and what to expect from it

    After reading the post of user agent0 about bad teachers who read from a piece of paper , I decided to write a comment with good advice from a newly-minted bachelor. The comment turned into a little article.
    Please read the first article before reading this post in order to better understand the essence.

    I am now completing the fourth year at one of the Odessa technical universities, in parallel with this, my fourth year of working as a web developer is already on my way. I worked on freelance, making poor sites on joomla, later, working as an outsourcer of the company I grew up to operate freely with several frameworks, to highloads and a little work as a team leadTimlid’s first assistant in the formation of the team. Now I have my own, big project and a small hardware store. Looking back at my student and work experience, I can affirm that I understand what I am talking about.

    By the time of the second year, I had as much indignation as the author of the above article. For a long time I was outraged about the pieces of paper in the hands of teachers, about their requirements and the quality of the information presented and the overwhelming complexity of homework. In the article, I several times noticed a sound idea that I want to help develop among current students and the author of post-anger:

    I could just as well go to work and study what I need in the evening.

    If you try to understand this idea a little deeper, then the essence of higher education institutions will immediately be revealed to everyone. I want to say that not a single university in the world (!!!) will give you any knowledge. You can’t sit and wait until the knowledge magically penetrates your head, only from the fact that you will be in the walls of the building with the appropriate sign. Even being in MIT, you need a lot, on your own, to work on yourself. If the student himself will not shovel a lot of documentation, then he will not learn how to do it, and today reading the documentation takes 50-60% of the programmer’s working time. Solving tasks of a higher level than the level of skill - a person develops. With this approach, in a week I managed to get from a person who had never seen web development in my eyes, very, in my opinion, great success in mastering git and the CodeIgniter framework. Hi Vitalik! :) The result is an excellent catalog of goods with an infinite level of investment categories. Yes, it’s not a trick, but you don’t need to expect more from a beginner. (I forgot to say that this year I, with my companion, already took undergraduate practice students from our university).

    To us, in the first year, right on the first couple, the dean said the following words:
    The fact that you entered here does not mean anything. Your fate and the level of your qualifications depends only on you.

    The biggest problem is that no one has understood this yet. And to my question to the teacher on operating systems: “Will we program under * nix” - I saw a very sad look and heard the phrase: “if only at least 10% of students were interested in this and could try to master ...”

    Let's get back to the topic of teachers.
    As I said earlier, for a long time I was indignant about the pieces of paper in the hands of the teacher, about the incompetence of these, the more I had nothing to compare with, outside the walls of the university, in the office, I had mentors - the guru of designing highload systems. When I thought about what was wrong, I understood. A teacher is a teacher, a person engaged in educational work with a noisy audience, taking exams, allocating time for retaking and protecting kursaki. It is not physically possible to catch all the innovations of the new iOS SDK in such a life. Really competent people work in the offices of large companies and if, God forbid, they all go to the dark side of teaching, then in half a year they will lose their competence.
    As for the pieces of paper, I’ll say: it’s impossible for an engineer to know everything by heart, there are always reference books and literature, for example, I remembered that in PHP the strpos () function is written that way, and not str_pos () only a year later, after the developer’s work and now, some I can’t remember the solutions on the go, I’ll climb into the old code or look for snippet bases.

    I solved the problem with the requirements in the second half of the second year. I just started to execute them, I learned, getting information on arithmetic in pairs, at home to solve differential equations. (It’s a pity I can’t find the illustration, it was good, it sank into oblivion). Especially in such a rhythm that you have to show something working tomorrow, and today you don’t understand this at all - you have to live a few more years, after graduation and there will be no concessions at work, because money is spinning there.

    The bottom line.


    The right student is a student who is able to pass the subject without appearing even once in pairs.
    We decided to conduct a survey among students of different institutes - how much
    they will pass the Chinese language. Approaching the physics and technology department:
    - How much will you hand over Chinese?
    “Well, about two months.”
    They come to Moscow State University:
    - How much will you hand over Chinese?
    - Well, about a month.
    They come to MEPhI:
    - How much will you hand over Chinese?
    - Is there a training manual?
    - There is!
    - Well, now I will finish smoking and go to take ....
    (thanks for editing from ironsnake )
    As a result, you need to be able to prioritize correctly, understand what you need and get only what you need, the rest of the slag (such as "creating a mailbox on yandex.ru", you will laugh, but we had such laboratory work in the first year) to weed out or to sit out.

    Epilogue


    I'm not trying to justify teachers - charlatans (hello, my head of the department! :) (this is not about him, he calls all the teachers in our department that way)). Such teachers can always be fought with intellect - this is not a problem.
    I’m trying to say that the subject of indignation of many students is based on the desire to gain knowledge in 5 years of grinding pants, and not in 5 years of hard and painstaking work.

    PS I apologize for posting in the programming hubs. Add to the hub "learning process in it" - karma does not allow, no way your hands do not reach to solve the problem. Nevertheless, many problems regarding programming are rooted in universities.

    UPD Put a post in the hub "learning process in it"

    Thank you for your attention!

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