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by usefulcat 250 days ago
I went to a good university with a decent CS program, and I'd definitely say I learned a lot more on the job than I did in school. I didn't always have any mentors to speak of but I did have at least a couple who were good.
1 comments

I think both can true. I learned a lot in my university, and my learning has been carrying me ever since. Case in point, it was never a problem for me to pick up functional programming or programming-language concepts in general because the courses on programming languages were so wonderful. I had no problem tap into formal verifications or data science or distributed systems because my universities gave me solid fundamentals. Heck, I was not even a good student back then. It was Sam Toueg of the failure detector fame who taught us distributed systems, yet I was lost most of the time and I thought he was talking some abstract nonsense. Only after I graduated could I appreciate the framework of analyzing distributed systems that he taught us.

On the other hand, we certainly learned more after graduation (or something is wrong, right?). When I was in the AI course, the CS department was all about symbolic reasoning I didn't even know that Hinton was in the same department. I think what matters is the core training stayed with me and helped me learn new stuff year after year.