Now this would be fine under normal circumstances and I would be happy to learn, like I previously did with web dev. Nor would I expect to know how to do it intuitively. However I literally went to university for this subject, this stuff surely should have been covered (it wasn't)? Feeling illiterate, and missing foundational knowledge (and so often across many fields) can't be right?.
I don't mean to write this as a university is a scam type post ... but like is this normal?
Does everyone go through this?
Did their degree actually help them in any meaningful way? Assuming you stayed in the same field of course.
I will say that my degree was useful but mostly because a 4 yr degree was required by my job. I could have gotten a 4 yr degree in pottery + 6 months of code monkey school and I could have gotten the same job.
I have the same gripe about k-12 school. !2+ years of school and most people by far can't get a decent paying job once out of school. That's the real scam from my view.
A university degree in any professional field is only the starting point for a lifetime of learning. In my pre-internet days I spent several thousand dollars a year on books and professional journals all of which I read cover-to-cover. With the internet I find all the materials I need with some focused searching.
The only thing that you truly learn at university is how to research, ie ask questions and then find the answers. Being a professional means having the experience to apply your learning to specific outcomes.
For me learning is very much just-in-time. I stumble across something I don't have a clue about, so I research. Typically I come across something that I don't understand, so then I dig into that and so on. Generally I need to get down into the weeds until I connect with something I already know. Then I start building upwards. Pretty soon I hit another thing I don't understand and repeat the exercise.
That’s why I went to uni to do EE/Robotics. I wanted the next step, suffice to say I did not get the next step from university.
I see what you’re getting at though. Just in time learning seems to be the way it will be. It’s just frustrating I don’t even have a base to go off of. Pretty much all my background knowledge has come from stuff I learnt outside of uni.
If your base doesn't help you launch, even in a small way, then you need to go below that base, back towards the fundamentals. I'm sure you learnt about logic gates, digital signals, transmission line effects, power glitches, etc. Unless you went to one of the well funded universities with youngish academics, then what you learnt was probably 5+ years behind the current state of the art. Add to that the years since you graduated. That is the knowledge gap in years that you need to traverse to establish an up to date base.
Until recently, I taught post-grad EE/SE (as an ex-industry, adjunct) at one of the country's top universities. My colleagues were dismayed at the inadequacy of STEM education of the first-year students. Year 1 has become a remedial school. Starting from such a low-level of knowledge 2-3 years doesn't provide enough time to teach all that is required to be successful in industry. In the field of digital electronics you typically need 3+ years of industry experience to become competent. Of course, motivated autodidacts can accomplish far more in far less time.
My personal opinion is that universities should teach things that would be useful to an expert which you won't have time to learn at a job. Like math and gaining deep understandings of things.
That said, I'd assume if you went to university in computer engineering (i.e. embedded systems/digital electronics), you'd have numerous labs and projects designing and using microcontrollers.
In CS, you might have one lab/class on CPU architecture/assembly but I'm guessing this would be a specialized focus area.
Bottom line I suppose is that I’m a network engineer working with a variety of clients. I enjoy the work for the most part (could do with less after hours stuff) and have fun interacting with the end users to fix their problems. The education might have been bogus, but I put in the work to learn it myself and am happy with where I’m at.
Digital circuits, FPGAs, microcontrollers, basic electronics, lots of making stuff on breadboards
One of my big undergrad projects was to build a CPU from scratch on an FPGA and write an assembler for it
Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS
I feel like so many CS classes are all about theory while a good chunk of CE classes actually have you writing code. I should have taken more CE classes, but I at least feel like I got to take some of the fun ones.
Not at my uni for sure. First (and only) microcontroller that we actually programmed that wasnt an arduino was in the final semester of the entire degree.
Very occasionally a data structure or understanding O notation.
Certainly none of the maths or electronics stuff.
You’re not wrong at all on the software side. With regards to the concepts though, we did a whole bunch of theory, but fairly often we did not do even the basics of applying it. I mean we literally did not do any, we did zero circuit/PCB design (the thing I’m trying to currently learn).
*Technically I did a robotics degree but the difference between mine and the EE degree at my university was at the most 5 modules, roughly 60 out of 360 credits.
The replacement modules certainly were not in anything to do with design or fabrication either. No soldering, no CAD, no ECAD.
You could have got through the entire degree without having once picked up a soldering iron or built a circuit. As long as you were good at maths you would get through, nothing else meaningfully mattered, except the dissertation of course.
I pretty much study every week to keep up with the industry, but I like it, so it feels more like a hobby. I’m not sure I would have the same strength and perseverance if I had quit uni the first year (or if I had never attended uni). This is just me, so YMMV.
If any, I feel like primary and high school are the real “scams”. I think they waste so much time over and over the same topics without going deep into nothing. I think it could be cut by 30% without any repercussions. I don’t recall anything valuable I have learnt in school (all the great lessons were due to my parents)
There's a lot of value on learning about Geography, History, Biology, the sciences, the social aspect of learning and going to a school and so on. It's hard to observe it after you have done it.
It can be possible you feel like you don't remember much, or don't find it useful, but in that scenario, I assume you'd easily be manipulated as you'd have very shallow knowledge about how the world works, despite perhaps having learned "30% more CS" because you just had less high school if it didn't exist.
Of course, there are improvements that could be made to the curriculum of schools, but I believe it's the most important learning lessons that set us up for life is there.
Same goes for chemistry for example. Can’t recall much tbh. My point is that primary/high school could be way more efficient.
Despite that I've found my schooling has really helped me along the way. Apart from the obvious (reading, writing, arithmetic). I took accountancy as a subject. When I started working for myself having that accounting knowledge was really helpful.
Physics slso played a role in life just after school. I spent some time in a "trade" type job (fire fighting) and high school physics (conduction, electricity etc) were all practical tools.
High school math helped with logic (that came in handy) and even algebra and formulas are good background and applicable to programing (and made it easier to learn.)
In hindsight I credit my English teachers with my communication skills- I have written text books and run training classes.
Its not like I "learned nothing since school" and its not like I was a model student at school, but I picked up skills when I wasn't looking.
As for Geography - well I don't know that that has affected my career, but it certainly gets the kids eyes rolling when I pontificate on rock types and magma intrusions. :)
But guess what? Because of my business experience, I love it. I'm incredibly excited about what the project (and potential final product) will be. So, I've been reading anything and everything, testing, exploring, learning. Can you believe we have the access to do this stuff today? It's incredible.
This is how the world works. For example, a few weeks back, I was under the hood of a steam-powered car, analyzing, looking, thinking about how they figured out some of the things they had figured out. What were they thinking historically? How did they feel about this design decision? Who taught them?
Moral of the story: Degrees don't teach this drive; you must nurture it. It's normal to feel lost at sea.
To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.
I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.
These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.
Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.
But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.
Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.
As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.
My EE major started with circuit theory, had labs with Arduinos and advanced to digital logic (embedded software) theory along with labs using professional-grade microcontrollers (TI MSP430, I think). Senior design capstone took us through schematic capture + PCB layout and getting a board fabbed. We did the soldering and populating components on the custom boards ourselves. Granted that was using Mentor Graphics and not Altium, which seems to be industry-standard, but it was still relevant and practical coursework.
It should be noted that Arduinos came about to greatly lower the cost of teaching embedded systems engineering. It really took off from there.
I'm in software and have made very basic PCBs for some projects. I have never used KiCAD. I'm sure the learning curve would be steep. But I expect that as my classes were focus on software design, not hardware design.
I have an MSEE. The only reason I learned the board design process in school is because my office mate convinced the department to let him teach the class completely out of his own generosity (he still had to TA like normal). The class was well attended, universally loved, and only ever offered once (the guy understabaly thought it was too much effort to do it again). It was a huge benefit to my career.
Board design is so accessible these days. Circuit design and debugging boards is still a steep learning curve.
I think of bachelors degrees, or undergraduate degrees and diploma’s as being like little samplers. There is advantages to getting a degree, like showing you can finish something you started, and I definitely think you do learn some skills, but I wouldn’t expect to gain mastery of a subject from just doing a degree. A degree might provide a good foundation, but you really have to build on it, either by doing more study, or working in a relevant industry that provides opportunities for growth, rather than just sitting there with your degree that will most definitely become outdated if you fail to keep up with the pace of change. Everything changes, even stuff that was considered true facts on the nature of the universe have been revised over time. (Not sure this was a good example since we know shit all about the universe actually.)
I’m currently completing my 5th and 6th degree’s at the moment (one is my second masters degree) I don’t feel very smart, and sometimes I don’t feel like the knowledge I’ve gained is that useful, except what I’ve noticed is that I listen more carefully to what other people say now, especially when they’re spouting their opinions on hot topics and often I just find myself noticing that people don’t actually know that they’re actually quite uneducated. In fact, I’d say the danger of undergraduate degree’s is that people think they’re educated by having a degree, and it’s great that they do have a degree, but there’s a lot more knowledge they don’t have, they just don’t know that they don’t know.
After doing my numerous degree’s, what I’ve learned for certain is that I could spend my whole life studying and I’ll never know everything there is to know, I find it humbling, but equally, my attitude every day is that I’m probably going to learn something new and I’m open to that. I guess some people might call that a growth mindset or something. I think others might just think I am a weirdo.