[pico303]

Go to college. While I have worked with engineers who didn’t attend university who were good engineers, the ones who attend university have a better, more mature approach to problem solving and learning new technologies. If you find a good computer science program, you’ll also gain a solid foundation on the underpinnings of the systems you’re working on — compiler design, CPUs, mathematics — and be worth so much more when you come to the table looking for a job.

[contingencies]

Different perspective here. All the best engineers I have met are self-motivated generalists. Furthermore, I have had career mathematicians beg me not to study it, on the grounds that applied forms are more efficient. (Then again, I don't tend to hang out in large organizations that engage in relative edge-case activity such as compiler design or processor design. Probably mostly because I find large organizations deeply sociopathic and unproductive.)

The best pre-university advice I received was "if you can't decide, get some life experience first, since a huge percentage of people spend four years studying something then discover they dislike or aren't motivated by, then have to start from scratch and change professions".

We should all aim to study every day at a pace, breadth and currency that is unsupported formally. Set aside time to learn every day, and you will always be wise. You are perhaps most successful if you learn throughout most of the day.

The real job of upper management in the 20th and 21st century is to learn things, because change is the constant thing that's going on. - Alan Kay (2017)

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup