[chas]

While I did computer engineering and not computer science, I frequently come back to how useful of an intellectual foundation my college education was. It's basically a whirlwind tour of humanity's greatest hits in a given domain. While it's hard to tell which ones are going to be a big deal for you, there are certain collections of skills that have been super useful to combine in the past, so getting the whole cognitive standard library under your belt is a great use of time.

While I thought I'd be focusing 100% on discrete math in my computing life, I was really happy to have been exposed to gradients and convolutions when neural networks came to prominence. I've also recently gotten interested in power electronics and have been really grateful for having previously been exposed to several varieties of transistors and having had half a semester of thermodynamics. Not to say that this background was really enough to be productive, but it was really nice to already know that these subjects exist and be familiar enough with their broad outlines to not have to completely bootstrap multiple fields at the same time.

I'm a little salty about this though because, at the time, there were a ton of classes that I thought were boring and useless. I was wrong (at least about the uselessness) about for vast majority of them.