{"id":2013,"date":"2017-10-21T14:18:49","date_gmt":"2017-10-21T12:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/?p=2013"},"modified":"2018-05-28T20:10:32","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T18:10:32","slug":"university-is-what-you-make-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/university-is-what-you-make-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"University is what you make of it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being a developer in a position far removed from academia, I am often confronted with the question of whether my university degree was worth the effort or not. Or to put it more mildly: would I be where I am today without it. I usually arrive at the same conclusion: yes, it was definitely worth it for me<\/em>. And here is an important thing to keep in mind about higher education: it is what you make it out to be<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Anecdotally, I know both sides of the education opinion spectrum very well. When I was growing up, higher education was the most important thing in the world, and people that did not go through university were frowned upon. I have also often heard the song of how companies hunger for computer science graduates, and how good it is to have a Master’s degree and not “just” a Bachelor’s degree.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I have met many people that told me that education is a waste of time. I also know at least a handful of professional developers that are self-taught and some of them wear that as a badge of honor — sometimes also dismissing education outright and calling it useless.<\/p>\n

I reject the mentality of both these extremes, and at least statistics like the 2017 Stack Overflow Survey<\/a> seem to indicate that the industry as a whole has a more nuanced view of education. According to the survey, 76.5% of all professional developers have a Bachelor’s degree or higher which means that roughly one out of every four professional developers do not have a formal education. At the same time, 32% (almost a third of all developers) respond that education is not very important, but most of the responses are grouped around the middle with education being “somewhat important”.<\/p>\n

Education or not, neither is right or wrong, and I think it is important to have a balanced view of this. However, I do not want to dismiss the feelings involved here. I would be lying if I said it did not affect me when I was a mid-twenties graduate without professional experience, and I saw much younger self-taught programmers with better business opportunities than myself. But then I realize that they probably did not build a neural network for image classification by hand, nor did they have the opportunity to discuss computer ethics with like-minded peers. And those things gave me immense joy. Likewise, I can sympathize with feelings of the opposite, although it would be disingenuous of me to presume what those feelings are.<\/p>\n

The outcome in both cases is the same: it is easy to feel doubt and resentment. From my point of view, this comes in the shape of “why the hell did I waste time in university”, and “how come they got by without a degree?”. When these feelings emerge, they have to be put to rest quickly, because they are not helpful, and most importantly, they are missing the point<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because in the end, when it comes to professional development, like many other parts of life, there is no right or wrong path to take. Higher education is not a measure of success, but it should not be dismissed either. University can be a tremendously rewarding experience, and the outcome is what you make of it, if you want it.<\/p>\n

… and let’s not forget the parties…<\/p>\n

\n

Photo by Ian Schneider<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being a developer in a position far removed from academia, I am often confronted with the question of whether my university degree was worth the effort or not. Or to put it more mildly: would I be where I am today without it. I usually arrive at the same conclusion: yes, it was definitely worth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,55],"tags":[199],"class_list":["post-2013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry","category-thoughts","tag-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}