| Briefly: You have the most important problem solving skill of all (and one of the rarer): recognition of your own limitations. http://norvig.com/21-days.html (Hopefully more later if I think of more) Addendum: I don't feel like it's as important to take classes in computer science. More important is to take classes in math, because math is a lot harder to teach yourself. Once you learn a little math (say discrete, number theory, and linear algebra), I think you will probably have the mental toolset to think scientifically and learn a lot of the computer science on your own. A basic class in data structures and algorithms might be nice because it will give you homework and fill in some gaps you might have from teaching yourself, but after that, computer science learning can be largely self directed. Automata is a really nice class to have if you can find it, because it ties in with the math, but it's not necessary for most industry programming. I never took classes in optimal search algorithms, computer vision, or statistical programming, but I've done work in each of these three things. I taught myself as much game programming, graphics and user interface stuff as I learned in classes. I had classes in compilers, languages, automata, AI, robotics... these were all great, and not things I could easily have taught myself, but they were also specialized, and haven't been so directly relevant afterwards. Linux is all experience; I haven't been on the job long, and I'm still learning it. Earlier this week I found out that I was running some of our servers to max CPU usage because I left greps running on them (didn't know the difference between suspending a process and putting it in the background)! Quitting is also totally cool if you can manage it. I used to be a graduate mathematician. It was very hard to figure out that this wasn't what I was supposed to be doing with my life... but figuring it out and leaving was the best thing I ever did. I would have been very unhappy. Now I'm happy! I was also extremely fortunate to have a father who was happy to support me switching fields. Your post reminds me how important that was, and makes me grateful enough that I think I should go call him. Good luck, and... uh... <small voice> a hug. |