[smoe]

I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions.

I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures.

On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do.

So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.