On Balancing Career & College...

An anonymous reader asks: "Hi folks. Some advice please - I've been in university twice already and quit both times - the first due to lack of interest in the course and the second a combination of lack of interest and work pressures. The second time round, I started a tech company and it's now three years old and doing OK. I am now seriously thinking about going back to Uni to get a degree (for real this time ;-). Is anyone out there successfully juggling running a company and studying at the same time? How do you juggle the two without hampering either due to lack of the right amount of attention?"

Comments

Degree

[jkirby]

It is apersonal thing; I think. I have considerd it once or twice, but in the end, I just read books on what I want to learn and leave it at that. I have nothing, along those lines, to prove to myself. I have a very successful software company and quite fulfilled.

Re:Degree

[Fweeky]

That's the GOOD thing about a degree, it makes you learn some important stuff you did not want to learn. It also makes you solve problems, not just read the books for pleasure.

This is what I thought.

Unfortunately, after two years doing Computer Science, it didn't turn out like that; the most expensive book I was expected to buy was "Learning to Program in Visual Basic 5"; ok, so it's a book I wouldn't have bought myself, but it certainly didn't teach me anything.

C: two semesters of writing tools to read in tsv's and calculate averages from the values, and another semester doing a RPN calculator. No look at libraries, no dynamic allocation, very little on pointers -- the second semester was effectively a clone of the first, only we were "allowed" to use * and &.

Java: we did a bit of UML, and proceeded to use it to develop a Counter class with methods increment(), decrement(), reset() and getValue(). We then got some C&P code to plug a GUI into it.

Web development: we did some old-sk00l tag-soup, and got told to write our own site using frames. Nobody came out of it with the slightest clue that HTML was actually specified anywhere or followed any significant rules.

Databases: The week before, I'd designed a (normalised) database with over 20 tables. It took me a few hours. The semester involved creating a database from a pre-written specification which had about four.

Assembler: Something I'd never normally look at, but through the semester we never got past a few loops and conditionals.

I did enjoy a couple of the modules (the math ones, and B Notation of all things, even assm was quite fun when we actually moved on), but most of it was slow, slow, slow and ultra basic. Even my A-level computing went into more detail.

Needless to say, I was on anti-depressants by the time I dropped out :)

You've Got To Want It

[NuttyBee]

It sounds like this guy found out its much more rewarding to work than to go to school. And doing both just plain sucks. There is no balance -- you pick one and do it seriously. Or you do your 40-50 hours a week at work and take a single class. Yeah, it takes forever, I went to school with a guy who spent about 10 yrs getting his BS doing just that.

I tried to balance school and work for a couple years, it didn't work. It hurt me in school and I was over stressed at work from my school demands. I finished college and quit working to do it.

Your mileage may vary.

It depends what country you are in...

[Phil John]

...if you are in the u.k. then you'll probably not have that many hours...because over here we specialise in one subject. I did AI & CS and had about 20 or so hours most weeks (along with other work).

Now here's the fun part...I ran my own company too! (As well as dj'ing both over here in the U.K. and in Brussels, Belgium) It IS possible, it just requires that you have a timetable and STICK to it.

The worst thing you can do is mix up your social time (and remember university IS about meeting new people) and your work time. Have a set time for uni work, for work work and for play (all work and no play...etc.).

It's possible...just make sure that you give university the same attention that you do your company and socialising and you should be fine.

Good Luck! It's hard but rewarding.

You might wanna try...

[Anonymous Coward]

...going for your MSc or MBA on-line. I've got no official education whatsoever, and MSc in IT is officially a post-graduate thing, but based on my working experience I got into the program, and you sound like you've got enough experience. Check out KIT e-learning on http://www.kitcampus.com It's an officially recognized MSc or MBA through the University of Liverpool and it's designed for working professionals, so you can set your own pace and meet with your peers from all over the world. Don't know if this helps, but it worked for me ;)

Re:Forget college

[BlackHawk-666]

I do the hiring of IT people for my company and we laugh at your silly college degrees. It's experience that counts, not how many years you spent in uni sucking up beer and chasing girls. Most of the uni grads we have seen are crap, unskilled and overconfident. I have a team of 18 programmers and the only uni grad is the lowest ranked programmer on the team. It will be another 12-24 months before we can get him trained to a state where he can start to really make contributions to the team. We will be training him with a combination of mentoring, real world projects and extra study - by the end of which he will be a kick butt programmer because (and here's the crucial bit) we hired him because he had great *attitude*.

Re:Forget college

[Herkum01]

That is usually the exception to the rule, especially when dealing with IT industry. To many people assume that because in IT you can do that, other professions are the same way.

Do you think anyone is going to hire you if you have never taking an accounting course, that just some experience running a lemonade stand is going to count? How about management, experience counts alot but a degree is often needed to get your foot in the door in the first place, noone is going to consider you for management just because, they need something to back their decision up.

Face it, IT is alot like manual labor, it is just putting your nose to the grindstone and just work. Someone willing to put in the time can make something of themselves, especially a smart person, but they are not going to turn into the CEO of a big company, you need that degree

No back on the subject at hand, if you really are looking to get a degree, ask yourself why, you have been to school twice and what ever reasons you had for going to school then were not enough to keep you there. You really need to understand why your going to school instead of is it possible. If you have a good enough reason, you can make it work

Consider on-line programs

[dogfart]

I'm in an online degree program, and that may fit the bill. The hardest problem with juggling college & a career maybe isn't so the the amount of time as the lack of schedule flexibility traditional college requires. A traditional college education expects that you are able to take M-W-F classes in the middle of the afternoon, and are just hanging around campus all the time so you can meet professors and TAs at their convenience.

If you go for an on-line program, make sure it is from a bona-fide accredited university - no degree mills. Also keep in mind that your instructors are used to teaching "regular" courses and dealing with full time students much younger (and more naive than you). They will make unreasonable demands of your time, and many will treat you in the condescending fashion notorious at universities (and distasteful to anyone with actual professional accomplishments)

Real world experience makes understanding the concepts much easier - you may be given some abstract topic and think, "oh yeah, I worked on something like that on project XYZ" while the topic will be entirely unfamiliar to your typical 19 year old with no real work experience.

Last point - if you are running your own company, you will have some time flexibility. If you are an employee, make sure your company buys off on the time commitment. There's nothing like having to drop a class because you employer sends you to Timbuktu a week before final exams.