Adult Content Warning

This community may contain adult content that is not suitable for minors. By closing this dialog box or continuing to navigate this site, you certify that you are 18 years of age and consent to view adult content.

Is our children learning?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by DrFrylock, Aug 31, 2010.

  1. Nettdata

    Nettdata
    Expand Collapse
    Mr. Toast

    Reputation:
    2,863
    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2006
    Messages:
    25,731
    Oh, and it might be worth noting that last year those systems I was referring to handled (at their peak) 36 million concurrent users, and made over $1.2 billion in revenue.

    The ones we are in the process of rolling out now represent a massive paradigm shift for the company, and are in the process of being adopted company-wide for all future on-line efforts.

    I have a very old (mid-80's) degree, and have absolutely no IT-related certificates or formal training since then. But I do have a reputation for building shit that works, quickly, and very well.

    Keeping up with current technology, and being able to quickly and properly determine the best tool for the job is key.

    Likewise, knowing when NOT to use the latest/greatest hyped tech is just as valuable.
     
  2. Nettdata

    Nettdata
    Expand Collapse
    Mr. Toast

    Reputation:
    2,863
    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2006
    Messages:
    25,731
    And one final thing.

    The single most important thing you will ever learn how to do is manage people and projects.

    I don't care what field you're in, if you're a social retard, and can't manage a team or project, or communicate efficiently and effectively, you're fucked. Unless you've got some sort of Stephen Hawking brainpan, but I'm betting you don't.

    The man and resource management training I received while in the military has, by far, had the biggest positive effect on my life.

    I highly recommend that you go get you some of that, regardless of your career path.
     
  3. Nettdata

    Nettdata
    Expand Collapse
    Mr. Toast

    Reputation:
    2,863
    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2006
    Messages:
    25,731
    Here's the video I speak of: <a class="postlink" href="http://vimeo.com/2723800" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://vimeo.com/2723800</a>
     
  4. Kubla Kahn

    Kubla Kahn
    Expand Collapse
    Emotionally Jaded

    Reputation:
    710
    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2009
    Messages:
    11,278
    If I were the supernintendo of a city's schools my first two requirements would be a mandatory personal finance class and mandatory gym class where the students had to run a mile before each day started. The first is something that I think a lot of high school graduates know dick about. How to keep your money in check, how to set up car and house loans, etc Some basic shit that is never taught but is vastly important to everybody. The only class in my high school that brushed these ideas was AP economics, which no one ever took. The second thing is just because kids are lazy fat ass these days and need some activity.


    I waisted my time in college, all six years baby. Id have to echo the internship/co-op sentiment here. I never did either and my resume if filled with a string of food service jobs. The only call back I ever got job hunting was from a guy who ran a scam business selling insurance. With a glut of people laid off and looking for jobs now Im sure my lack of experience has seen my resume tossed in the trash more times than not.
     
  5. PeaMan

    PeaMan
    Expand Collapse
    Average Idiot

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 22, 2009
    Messages:
    69
    I am just going into my final year of a degree in physics. This degree is going to be invaluable to me as I am looking at going into technical fields. I go to a university which only offers science courses and as such I probably have a skewed perspective, but when I talk to my friends who have gone to other universities the only people who seem satisfied with their schooling are those engaged in a 'hard' degree. People who are doing other degrees at party universities (though they don't exist to the same level as the US in the UK) might be having a nice time, but I hear a lot of bitching about no job prospects etc.

    Reading through what some of you have said also makes me think the system you have in the US isn't great. In the UK you go to university with your degree program and you just do that. I went into physics at 18 and have a degree of just physics, which means 3 years of specific information which allows specialisation. This seems better to me than buggering about with majors and minors.
     
  6. Frebis

    Frebis
    Expand Collapse
    Emotionally Jaded

    Reputation:
    339
    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2009
    Messages:
    2,503
    I think you would have benefited from a more well rounded US education. At least you we could teach you not to make up words.

    I have BS in Computer information systems. I finished the degree in a little under three years, going to school through the summer because I wanted to graduate as fast as possible so I could make money. Coming from a middle class frugal family, I wanted nothing more than to make tons of money and blow it on dumb things (i.e. running the AC with the windows open). I would say one year of those classes were important. The year that I learned advanced data structures, design patterns, and advanced OO concepts. I'm sure project management would have been important, but I was already managing people at my warehouse job, so I flew through those.

    I've learned more on the job than I ever could have in school. I'm an SAP consultant now. While I was in school we didn't learn fancy things like logistics and ERP. Virtually everything I know outside of some of the concepts I use when coding came from the job. Everything else I learned from the RMMB (Seriously, I learned to write there and how to deal with people).

    Am I thankful for my degree? Yes. Because my company wouldn't hire entry level people without it.
     
  7. Disgustipated

    Disgustipated
    Expand Collapse
    Emotionally Jaded

    Reputation:
    1
    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2009
    Messages:
    969
    Location:
    Gold Coast, Australia
    Perhaps a course in English would have been of some benefit:

    Definition of BUGGER

    1
    : sodomite
    2
    a : a worthless person : rascal
    b : fellow, chap
    3
    : a small or annoying thing <put down my keys and now I can't find the buggers>
    Origin of BUGGER

    Middle English bougre heretic, from Anglo-French bugre, from Medieval Latin Bulgarus, literally, Bulgarian; from the association of Bulgaria with the Bogomils, who were accused of sodomy
    First Known Use: 1555

    Courtesy of Merriam-Webster.
     
  8. PeaMan

    PeaMan
    Expand Collapse
    Average Idiot

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 22, 2009
    Messages:
    69
    This.I just speak the language properly.
     
  9. Dyson004

    Dyson004
    Expand Collapse
    Experienced Idiot

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2009
    Messages:
    188
    I finished my undergrad degree at a local state college and I am now in my second year of a Clinical Psychology PhD program.

    I joke that my Bachelor's doesn't mean shit. I graduated from a tiny state school in three years. After I graduated, I didn't even go into my field (Psychology) because I couldn't make a livable wage. Mental Health simply didn't pay well enough at the Bachelor's level, so I made use of my business minor and I worked as an Call Center Insurance Agent, a mortgage officer, a bouncer, and finally, I ended up working at the local Police Department. None of my jobs required a college degree, but it was definitely a factor in the hiring process.

    However, for the most part? My education has worked out. I suspect my demographic information is different then a majority of the board. I am first generation, my father came to the US back in '75 with no money. My mother is from the Appalachian mountains. I've been poor my entire life. College was awesome. I went to college on a full academic ride, with a guaranteed work study at the Admissions Department. I was able to secure another work study as a Tutor for the GE Courses and for Psychology courses. I was able to become financially independent while I was at college. My father was working two full time jobs simple to pay the bills, so the fact that they did not have to send me money was a relief to them. Shit, I managed to keep approximately $400-$600 dollars in savings just in case my folks needed me to cover a bill. Not only that, my college sent me to Africa to do research under an NIH based initiative. College definitely broadened my world views and helped me become a more responsible, well-rounded individual. I left undergrad with no debt.

    Now I'm in graduate school, and the economy is horrible. My parents helped me out a little bit last year because I wasn't funded and honestly, I had no food. I was delinquent in rent for the entirety of this past summer (I stay in on campus apartments) because I had no money...but things are looking up. I am funded this year. I have tuition remission and a stipend. I'm teaching statistics for 20 hours a week, and I'm working in the counseling center approximately 20 hours a week. I have a part time practicum for pay (which is roughly $350 per report) and I struggle to find time to work on my Master's Thesis, which, conveniently, I'm using the data set from my research in Africa.

    I'm happy with my decisions, and my education, but that's because I want to be a clinical psychologist. It's not something that can be taught at a vocational school. I'm receiving specialized knowledge that can't be learned online or from a book. There is no substitute for actually doing therapy, and graduate school provides me the opportunities to practice.

    My formal education was the easiest way to changing my socioeconomic status and giving my future children an easier life then I (or my father) had. Shit, I'm just now starting to financially benefit from my intellect.

    I would offer these words of advice to folks headed to college:
    It doesn't matter where you attend undergrad.
    Don't take out ridiculous amounts of loans to finance your undergrad education.
    Don't languish in undergrad either. My brother has been working on his bachelor's for the last 10 years. If you find yourself jumping from major to major, realize that for the most part, a lot of places don't care what your degree is, just so long as you have one. It makes you much more employable for whatever reason. My brother has been passed over for management several times at UPS simply because he doesn't have a degree.
     
  10. Aperture

    Aperture
    Expand Collapse
    Village Idiot

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Dec 29, 2009
    Messages:
    10
    I think there a combination of factors at work here, and they all combine to form the shitshow that is post-secondary education. When you think about things like academic inflation and educational devaluation, they both work against any matriculating student these days. More and more kids are going into serious debt before they even enter the workforce. I also think that American society places too much value on degrees and not enough on apprenticeship and trades, which are also necessary.

    I don't think that the college experience is useless by any stretch of the imagination, quite the contrary. It broadened my outlook, gave me a different perspective and allowed me to interact with people that had vastly different interests than my own. I think for that, I was truly grateful. I also realized that the path differs for everyone, and that people really need to understand or figure out (during that time) what their educational goals are before they blindly drink the kool-aid. If you're a self-starter and can learn on your own, there are certainly instances where more schooling isn't going to help you in the least. I also think that there is a lot of insight that can be gained by delving into academia at least for a little while. If you can apply it, it's useful. If not, than you should be doing something else. If you can attend post-secondary debt free (whether through scholarship or generous relatives), you'd be a fool not to go for it.
     
  11. Jimmy James

    Jimmy James
    Expand Collapse
    Emotionally Jaded

    Reputation:
    240
    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2009
    Messages:
    2,169
    Location:
    Washington. The state.
    Focus: My formal education ended right about the time my college professor tried to teach the class Office 2000. For a networking degree. I had been doing desktop support for about 3 years at about that point. I'm now a support engineer for an outsourced IT company in Seattle. I do everything from server/desktop/network appliance deployments to retarded shit like virus removal. I love my job 364 out of 365 days of the year. I know there is enough upward mobility in this field to make more than enough to live comfortably.

    I'm not going to lie. I stopped caring about school as soon as high school was over with. I was lucky enough to get a kind of unpaid internship doing hands-on desktop support at 17. After 4 years of working at a couple of different shops, I had gotten an interview at the place I had stayed at until I moved up here in May of last year. The owner of the company told me straight up that degrees are nice, certifications are better, but experience was the best. It was at that point I stopped deluding myself into thinking that I'd go back to school at 21 and get that computer science degree. I began focus on being good at what I had my hands on every day and thanked my lucky stars I didn't have a 5 figure student loan to pay off.
     
  12. Politik

    Politik
    Expand Collapse
    Disturbed

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Jan 5, 2010
    Messages:
    276
    This post is going to end up kinda stream of thought but I think about this all the time so fuck you.

    I did debate all though high school and since I'm fairly introverted my core group of friends remained the same. Despite my social maladjustment and fucked up sense of humor I managed to fuck the four attractive girls on the team and land a girlfriend who is still by far the hottest/most caring/sociable/far superior to me girl I have ever been with. Because I was somehow getting laid all throughout high school I never really had the motivation to expand my social circles too much and as a result coming into college my ability to meet new people sucked. When I got to school as a freshmen I was scared, insecure, barely knew anyone and just wanted to fit in (like a bitch). Our Greek system dominates the party scene because frats live in old mansions that seem to be impossible for cops to ever get search warrants for. Both of my parents were Greek at U of I and between them and peer pressure I ended up pledging for the first frat that bidded me. Pledgeship was incredibly degrading and raped my grades first semester. I'm still very resentful for the shit that I had to go through and looking back, if I knew I would have to eat dog food or work security every single weekend I would NEVER have joined. However, the one very useful thing that pledging at a big university did for me was punt my ass out of my typical comfort zone. Talking to brothers to get their paddle signatures, getting hit on by drunk bitches, and always being surrounded by big groups of people (which used to make me wildly uncomfortable) became the norm. My social skills after going through my first year of college are about 238% better and I will be far more successful in any career path I pursue because of my college experience thus far.

    At what point did college become a technical training facility? As far as I know it was meant to be an isolated place to focus on learning for the sake of learning, and coming into college I was expecting my peers to have a different attitude than 'How can I make the most money with my degree doing the least amount of work'. From what I've seen you can turn any major into a career if you have the brains and get good grades. My friends sister is a certifiable genius and her parents initially reamed for for majoring in Cultural Anthropology for undergrad. Now she's just finishing her Ph.D in Anthro and thanks to a couple of successful internships has a research gig aligned where she'll be making a fuckton of money as soon as she graduates. It's one thing to major in Communications because you want to drink a bunch of Keystone and 'dun like readin books', but if you're planning on getting into politics or marketing and make smart moves you can be highly successful with it. I'm surprised by the overwhelming number of pessimistic responses here. Sure, there are always a handful of bullshit GenEd classes you need to deal with but those weed out a lot of the retards. If you think that the measure of a successful college career are the number of practical facts you can absorb I feel bad for you. Every class you take shapes the way you think and how your brain processes new information which is useful for any career path. If you feel like your college experience has been too shallow then fucking switch majors to something that challenges you.


    http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml


    I love social sciences, I love teaching. Majoring in Secondary Education was the logical path for me, but if I loved Underwater Basket Weaving you bet your ass I would have majored in it and found a way to make a career out of it. The way our post-secondary education works in the US is pretty fucked up, but then again so are most of our major institutions. If you choose to go to college, go with an open mind, study passionately in field you feel passionately about and don't constrain yourself to other peoples world views and expectations. There is a lot to gain.
     
  13. lust4life

    lust4life
    Expand Collapse
    Emotionally Jaded

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2009
    Messages:
    2,562
    Location:
    Deepinthehearta, TX
    I went to college mainly because I was expected to. Mine was the first generation in our family to go, and it was stressed for as far back as I can remember. If I could go back to high school, I would have liked to look at the local public school and learning a trade like plumbing or carpentry as an option, rather than the private prep school I attended being the be-all and end-all. I've always had a good sense for business as well as "people skills" so I probably would have been able to establish myself in my own business without the expense of both high school and college on my parents, as well as the student loans I carried. But I never considered that as even being an option. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the education I received, but it would have been nice to be asked if this was what I wanted and given some choices and guidance.

    I agree with most of Frank's earlier list of majors, however, my BA is in communications and played well in getting me into the ad agency business back in the 80s, so in my case, I really can't say its useless. As for graduate degrees and being "overqualified," every one of my college buddies with undergraduate business degrees (my wife as well) all found very early on in their careers that without an MBA, advancement was going to be limited in their Fortune 500 environments. We were talking about this the last time we all got together and their consensus was, without the MBA, manager was about as high as you would go (they are employed by such companies as Toshiba, Verizon, Allstate, GE, Pfizer, American Express, Exxon/Mobil, Xerox). They all got their MBAs, and they're all either Directors or VPs.

    I'm moving in a completely different direction and an advanced degree is required for my profession and licensure, and now my academic advisor and mentor is dropping hints about a PhD, but I've got time to make that decision.
     
  14. Nick

    Nick
    Expand Collapse
    Experienced Idiot

    Reputation:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2009
    Messages:
    236
    Location:
    Chicago
    I did the college thing, got a job in business after graduation, and luckily it panned out pretty well for me. I was very pragmatic about how I chose my major, knowing very well that I would have to be a cubicle monkey for a few years, but more likely than not, I would have a good chance at making a decent living. Did I follow my dreams? No. Did I sell out to be a corporate drone for the rest of my life? Maybe. Am I content where I am? You bet. Some people may look down on me for taking the "easy" road, but I've got no problem with that. I'm barely into my 30s, am comfortably making mid-6 figures, and have very little stress from a personal/financial standpoint. I don't lead the most interesting life, but it's good for me, and it will one day be good for my family.

    I had every opportunity to pursue career aspirations to be a writer, or an artist, or a philanthropist, or otherwise; just like every English major or graphic arts major had the chance to pursue a career in the corporate world. If you went to college and chose a study path without researching what your most likely career/employment opportunities would be, then I don't feel sorry for you if you're unhappy where you are.

    Look, I'm not that old, but here's a kernal of knowledge that will hold true for the rest of your working life. Unless you are planning to be an entrepreneur of some sort, the only way you are going to get a "real" job is by participating in an interview process. Unfortunate for you, there are more candidates than there are jobs out there, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Whether you you're more qualified than the next guy or not, I guarantee that if I had to choose between the guy with the college degree and the guy who didn't, 11 times out of 10, I'll take the guy who took the initiative to get at least some form higher education. Let me pose the following scenario and see if any of you anti-education numbskulls can come up with a response that would get you the job:

    Nick: So I see here you're looking to break into the [so and so] industry. I skimmed your resume. Looks like you don't have a college education, an applicable skillset, or any relevant work experience. We've interviewed 10 other people for this position, all with college educations, all who at least have had some requisite course work. What makes you a better candidate for this job? Was there any reason you chose not to go to college? What have you been doing for the last 12 months?

    Seriously, if one of you can come up with a response that a recruiter would go ga-ga over, go ahead, get me wet.