| I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade. Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing. Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful. So here is my take: 1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with. 2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations. It's interesting. With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them. Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students. I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject. Sorry that was a bit of a ramble. |