University is Boring

I’m currently writing this post while traveling home from seeing the latest X-Men film^[1]. I’ve got an exam tomorrow, at 10am to be exact. But for some reason I’m not that interested in it.

That’s what I’ll be writing about today, my current lack of interest in my university qualification. It just isn’t interesting me anymore.

It started last year in my first year of university, because the lessons were easy, but it was my first year at university. So I put this down to the fact I had experience in programming before, and maybe it would get harder. Also because it was fun getting straight A grades with very little work.

Now as I’m finishing my second year, with just tomorrow’s exam left. I’ve found it more than boring. I’ve noticed that we’ve been learning parts of Computer Science that just isn’t needed. For example for the second half of my Advanced Programming module, we had to create a website using Java Web, along with JavaDB in the backend. That’s terrible. No one uses, or should use Java Web to create websites.

There’s also the fact that we’re also being taught the stupid parts of Networking, Not networking that could be useful or interesting. But one bit of coursework was for us to use a really old bit of software to simulate a network, that uses various messages between nodes. We didn’t get taught any of the knowledge needed to do this, so I’m still unaware what any of it meant. We were just given a tutorial for the software, and we just had to follow it. Then submit it. That’s not learning.

Software Engineering is potentially important to some people, maybe for future project managers, or people who generally want to manage other people. I want to just do work. Whether it’s developing an app, or working on a website, I don’t care what methodology my project is using. It’s pure semantics.

So as you can see after my second year of university, I’m just bored.

And even though the modules aren’t interesting, the lecturers could at least try to make it so. Or maybe even challenge us in a way that wants us to do well. Rather than simply reading out a PowerPoint presentation that we can simply access ourselves.

I don’t need even think that they know what they’re teaching half the time, as many students have asked questions based on lectures. They just point them towards someone else. One example that shocked me, was when we were learning some basic UNIX commands. They use a single Linux machine that we all log on to. I decided to use the wall command^[2], and some people found it a bit funny, while someone else thought their “terminal had been hacked”. The shocking bit was, when they informed the lecturer about it, they responded with “Hmm.. This seems very serious, we’re going to have to look into this”. Not once did they ask the class about it, for which I would of happily admitted it was me. And then probably laughed. Or did they notice that the message had been prepended with my University username.

It’s little things like that, that makes me less interested in getting a degree, and more on how I’m going to make a living afterwards. The degree isn’t worth anything really, apart from a massive amount of debt that I will have to pay back when I earn decent money.

But anyway, I have a lecture in about 9 hours, so I better be going to bed.