[VvR-Ox]

This is the gap between theory and practice.

When you study you will learn a lot of stuff that seems useless for a Software developer at his daily job.

When you only know practice you will be able to use the tools but probably do not understand what most of them do, how they do it and why. Of course this may seem useless in many cases but on certain occasions like optimization some more theoretical knowledge may help you to dramatically improve your code or architecture (It could be the other way around of course).

In the end I think no matter if it is practical or theoretical know how you may gain something from it in the future even if it is not a (typical) topic of your field of work.

A very important insight for me is that you can learn as long as you breathe and it helps you to age more gracefully while being better at what you do.

[tripzilch]

When I studied there were various courses I thought useless, only to realize years later how important they were. I'm glad I learned them.