Mid-College Discovery
I just finished my Machine Learning midterm, which was one of the most stressful midterms this semester, and it was surprisingly good.
I mean of course I made mistakes, like I totally forgot the gradient of the ridge function when performing a gradient descent (I thought it would just be the partial derivative when I was taking the test, but in fact I have done the reviewing on the subject the night before; so I guess my mind was just too anxious). But overall, I appreciate my effort and I believe I can get a good grade out of it.
The subject I want to talk about todayis about college and how I feel about it as a CS student. I have been thinking about this for some time now and I want to pout it out.
For starters, let me put my attitude here: I can live with the system, but I don’t like it. Especially when the tuition of these colleges are surging madly ($70k per year for four years and that’s without the living expenses. I can buy a HUGE house in the suburb and live probably a happy life with that money), students are forced to be driven by their future earning and student debt. And with the higher tuition, students are having greater expectation of what college diploma can do for them; but ironically, it cannot do much. The best opportunity for college students to have a somewhat great job is majoring in computer science. If you do, you might have a chance to catch a job in the big companies in silicon valley and repay your college debt in like five to six years. It’s crazy. Can you even imagine repaying your college tuition in five to six years? Too short for average people. When I was in high school, there were rumors about a certain teacher who still did not finish his college debt ten years after being a teacher. The time I heard about it, I laughed; and now I realized I was really immature. It’s just sad.
The CS major is a dilemma as well. After being admited as a CS student in NYU, I was really excited to meet others who have the same passion in computer with me, but I couldn’t find many. The most frequent reason I heard about why you go for CS was “it’s just good pay.” I do respect their decisions, but the reality does frustrate me. I just feel sorry for those who are putting pressure onto their shoulder when studying something they don’t really like. On the bright side though, there are people growing passion for this major and they progress fast. But overall, I do expect to meet someone who has similar experience as me, being a script kid in elementary school, trying jailbreak and hackintosh in middle school, etc. I guess I just havn’t met with all of my classmates yet.
Another thing about CS is the curriculum. There was a really BAD course that I HAD to take in my freshman year called “Intro to CS”. That course is a perfect reflection of what CS major has become in many universities in my opinion – a relentless machine that tries to spit out “programmers” to industry but fails for many people. The core idea of “Intro to CS” was to introduce the new CS students what the industry is like and what tools they use. I do like the theory of the course (we all gonna work someday right?), while it ignores the fact that programming for a product is nothing like studying CS in university; a lot more middlewares are used and the scope of “programming” is just too wide to reach for a single programmer. Ultimately, the course became a mixture of different software tryout every week and HTML coding. To be honest, from what I was told, most students are confused between VM and docker since they were introduced briefly in consecutive two lectures and I think one hour for each lecture is not enough for both students and professors to transfer knowledge about those two things. In the end, many students just go to office hours and follow TAs’ instructions to finish their homework. As soon as the professor realized we needed a focus on the course, he turned the course into a intro to web programming and finished the semester with it. I do not blame the professor for the course setting, he is a great professor in my Intro to OS class; it’s just there are too much gap between programming in academic and industry setting.
But the question comes: should the university adapt what the industry needs for undergraduate curriculum? With such high tuition, what is the goal of university now? At least the major is called “computer science” with “science” in it, shouldn’t the students study more science of CS than “this is what you do when you work for big corp”? Even if the university decides to suit students for job is better than preparing them for a scientific research route, how will it work for students without real engineering experience?
It’s not a failure. It’s just confusion.