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Study CS in undergrad. Wait until Graduate School to specialize.

Study liberal arts in undergrad. Wait until grad school or your career to specialize.

As an employer in almost any field, I'd rather have someone that can think critically about everything generally rather than only one thing specifically. Nowadays they call this being well-rounded, but they used to just call it being educated.

Look at programs like St. John's College (no affiliation with this school, except that I also am in IT after having studied the general liberal arts somewhere else) where you read great books and discuss them for four years, learning to think rather than learning what other people think. While you're at a school like this, get involved with their IT department as a work-study job. Learn their network inside and out. Save money for your CCNA tests (or whatever), then start looking for work or grad programs after you're finished.

Your starting salary may suffer for not having a tech degree, but if you're a sharp kid with a broad education, you will surely advance more quickly than the specialists in the long run.

Belloc

Learn Homeric and Attic Greek; and translate portions of Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament

Learn French and translate various writers -- Montaigne, for example

Read almost all of these books, in whole or in part -- a list which includes everything from Plato to Shakespeare to Heidegger to Smith to Austen to Marx

Study mathematics all four years, working from Euclid's Elements, through Newton and Leibniz's invention of the Calculus, and on through non-Euclidean geometry, Cantor, and others

Study music for one year; including history, theory, composition, and limited performance

Study laboratory science for three years; reading primary works and recapitulating experimentation spanning, for example, Lavoisier to Dalton to Miliken, Galen to Darwin, Newton to Einstein, and others

A partial semester of painting and sculpture

This is not just a gloss on the the so-called "Great Books"; and it's certainly not purely humanities or an impoverished "history or science" curriculum, either. It's heavy on both the math/science and on literature/philosophy -- not to mention that the year of music is the equivalent in some ways to more than a year at conservatory. Finally, it's really a lot of very difficult work.

Of course, it's not called a "university", it's called a "college" since it's integral and singular. This is what higher education was like in the past, and it indeed does live on in the US. St. John's is in fact the third oldest college in the US (behind William & Mary and Harvard); but the "New Program" has only existed since 1929.

Not being a patent lawyer, I don't know what qualifies as prior art, but this looks like it is for their book review and discussion method, and if so, I know of an institution that has been dedicated to the practice of a 'Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item' since 1937. Is it so different to do it on-line that you get to have a patent?

I apologize in advance for being slightly off-topic, and may only be able to join this post tangentially to the original story by relating it to St. John's College. This school is dedicated to the study of great books, again almost all of which are in the public domain, or ought to be.

Then again, this non-sensical post is an excuse to ask Theatetus: what is your name?

It seems to me that most of the free books mentioned on this thread are sci-fi, and popular fiction. It is by virtue of this fact that these dispersion methods for books have not caught on more. The more popular the book, the more likely one is to charge for it. Perhaps we ought to start organizing things in the public domain, and things like classics, technical works, etc, that are more likely to be thought of as "free". Make these books accessible, and create a good interface, to show proof of concept in terms of readers and the bigger guys may come around, at least to publishing on and off-line works (the online versions being free or very cheap). Here are my links to some stellar classics archives. Aside from some of the more obscure math and science works, I believe my whole school's curriculum is available for free on the web:

Perseus Project

Great Books Index

The Internet Classics Archive

Bartleby

Enjoy these free reads. They are the greatest books ever written.

This produces an individual who is a Liberal Artist in the original sense - one who is qualified to apply a disciplined reason to any subject and arrive at innovative conclusions.

On the surface, it may not seem like much use to a person who wants to be in IT - there aren't any programming courses, management fads, or courses on building robots or designing digital circuits - but the substance of the courses gives a rock solid foundation to the intellect whch the canned courses of a departmentalized university training institutes lack.

What is there is the basic sparks of every issue in contemporary life - what is life, what separates man from beast, what is number, how is information moved between minds, how did the scientific knowledge we take for granted - geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus, astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, electricity, sound, and sight - come to be, and how little has changed in centuries. The ethical struggles of man are the same now as they were for those who have come before us, and they have good answers to many of them. The sciences have made remarkable strides in the last 60 years, but it is predicated on, and forshadowed by, the work of centuries . Knowing how and why things ended up as they did can give us a warning sign when we go off towards the cliff, show us the dark spots on the map that need to be explored, and remind us of fascinating subjects that had to be left unexplored because the tools were insufficient for the task. All that makes much more "well-rounded" individuals asfter four years of formal study than any program filled with HOW-TOs and formulas.

In my quest to understand where I really want to go in my life, I came across a school named St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. Currently, I'm a baby, yes, only a Junior in High School, and I currently hold an internship at a small e-business company. We mainly work with (but not limited to) languages commonly tied in with web applications such as Java (JSP's), BASIC (ASP's), Javascript, HTML, C++, and Perl. I personally have aquired a Programmer's Java Certification over this past summer.

Anyway, back to St. John's ... lots of kids at my school want to grow up. It's what kids want to do. They want to leave their nests, stay out all night ... they want to be free and in college. I was "blessed" with an early shot at the business world--a well paying job that would look wonderful on college applications and give me a real jump-start on people going into the working world as well as college programming classes. Yes, I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm a little bit further than the kids in the CS classes learning VB who don't know what a switch statement is. And at first, yes, it was a blessing. I loved it. I got to go to "work" after school and talk to people who liked fast cars and video games and browse Slashdot and make fun of something that whenever you were feeling down you could rip on (Microsoft, our IBM e-commerce platform, or other people's code). It was heaven on Earth.

Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?

Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But ... something in me has changed. I don't want to be an average Joe and chill with people who only want to have LAN parties and dream of sitting in a cubical all their lives so they can have the fastest cars and feel superior to the people that once made fun of them. That's not me. I'm sorry, but it really isn't. As much as it was me one day, I'm a different person now. And I really think there's more to life than money (which, from what I've come to understand at my company, is really the only thing that concerns most people. They'd complain often about their 60-70K salaries, about how the people in Silicon Valley were making more money than them. This company's in a rural area outside of Philidelphia. Cost of living is 25% of that in Silicon. WTF?) I honestly hate working there. The only thing that makes me go on there is that High School jobs really are either the local theme park or food stores. While I'll probably continue my work there for the rest of my high school career, I look forward to the day I leave.

Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.

In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.

In my quest to understand where I really want to go in my life, I came across a school named St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. Currently, I'm a baby, yes, only a Junior in High School, and I currently hold an internship at a small e-business company. We mainly work with (but not limited to) languages commonly tied in with web applications such as Java (JSP's), BASIC (ASP's), Javascript, HTML, C++, and Perl. I personally have aquired a Programmer's Java Certification over this past summer.

Anyway, back to St. John's ... lots of kids at my school want to grow up. It's what kids want to do. They want to leave their nests, stay out all night ... they want to be free and in college. I was "blessed" with an early shot at the business world--a well paying job that would look wonderful on college applications and give me a real jump-start on people going into the working world as well as college programming classes. Yes, I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm a little bit further than the kids in the CS classes learning VB who don't know what a switch statement is. And at first, yes, it was a blessing. I loved it. I got to go to "work" after school and talk to people who liked fast cars and video games and browse Slashdot and make fun of something that whenever you were feeling down you could rip on (Microsoft, our IBM e-commerce platform, or other people's code). It was heaven on Earth.

Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?

Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But ... something in me has changed. I don't want to be an average Joe and chill with people who only want to have LAN parties and dream of sitting in a cubical all their lives so they can have the fastest cars and feel superior to the people that once made fun of them. That's not me. I'm sorry, but it really isn't. As much as it was me one day, I'm a different person now. And I really think there's more to life than money (which, from what I've come to understand at my company, is really the only thing that concerns most people. They'd complain often about their 60-70K salaries, about how the people in Silicon Valley were making more money than them. This company's in a rural area outside of Philidelphia. Cost of living is 25% of that in Silicon. WTF?) I honestly hate working there. The only thing that makes me go on there is that High School jobs really are either the local theme park or food stores. While I'll probably continue my work there for the rest of my high school career, I look forward to the day I leave.

Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.

In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.

Some educators believe reducing assessment increases motivation and learning. (e.g. Pirsig mentioned that in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

Not to mention several top U.S. colleges where they've been living the dream for decades, either doing away with grades entirely or removing them as a publicly available motivating factor: Hampshire College, University of California-Santa Cruz, St. John's College, and others.