[nja4]

I am a junior at a target CS school in the US. I'm currently studying in Europe at Sweden's KTH, reputed as one of the top engineering schools in Europe/Scand. I loathe all the "EUROPE IS SO MUCH BETTER!111!!!!!" posts everyone makes because I always feel like it's out of touch and hip to say to. The culture here in Sweden is way more relaxed. This is definitely NOT a catchall, but a catch-some, sort of statement, even if I do interact with mostly Masters students from across Europe, probably >50% of my classmates. It's not as rigorous here, and it's not as if the students are still "killin' it!" because I have been in exclusively project classes, and the projects presented have been pretty mediocre. Most students aim to pass. Few students in my MASTERS LEVEL classes (bear in mind it's 4/5 year students unlike in the US) have NEARLY the chops of any kid in my undergrad CSE program, and I've been in 4 groups now with around 30 students and obviously talk to many more. I'm frustrated because everyone hates on this system, but it's allowed me to perform so much better technically than any of my classmates here that I've interacted with. Also, His comment that "you may need to reinvent the wheel sometimes" applies to so few. I am going to be designing REST APIs or similar for years, I bet. I am going to need to know reasonable HCI for years, I bet. So many people don't learn the right idioms. The right design patterns. Every internship I've had has "man, sucks that we taught ourselves this technology instead of learned formally" or "man, this stack was built by non-engineers and is an un-maintainable monolith." I can't take these statements seriously. You can learn programming by yourself. You can be way better than I'll ever be through self teaching, but I feel like this is similar (but to a much less extent) logic to, "Bill Gates dropped out of college!!!11!!!!", and it's just NOT true for MOST people. The comments before me are SO right that it's career jeopardizing.