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Scholarships From FOSS Organizations?
Athaulf writes "I'm a high school kid with big dreams of prestigious technology schools like MIT or Cal-Tech. The problem is, my upper-middle class family had more down to Earth plans for me and my college choices (about $30,000/year more down to Earth, actually), so financial aid and college savings won't come anywhere near MIT's price tag. However, I've been programming in C for a while now, and might release a GPL'd Linux app soon. With this self-taught programming experience, academic merit, and plenty of extra curricular activities, are there any FOSS supporting organizations who might grant me a scholarship for my contributions? Do companies like Google or Red-Hat offer scholarships to big name schools in return for a few years of work after college?"
If you go to say, Sweden, there will be no tuition fees. You have two decent Unis there: The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg. You may also check out DTU in Denmark and the unis in Aachen and Dresden (Germany).
In a lot of European states you can get away with 0 in tuition fees or a very moderate fee of a 1000 per year. For $30k / year you can live a very comfortable life as a student in Europe.
Also, having studied abroad is something that would look very good on your CV.
And, not only will it put you at advantage going into any job, it is because the education at MIT is fantastically great. Some of the best professors in the world teach there, much of the most interesting research in the world is done there, and as an undergrad even you have those resources at your fingertips. Not only that, but the other people at MIT are a very interesting bunch, some of the smartest 20 year olds in the nation, all packed together. It's really something special. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I don't go there, but I've visited and had friends who did, and it's really something else, and going there won't just be a pretty name on your resume. Sure, you can get a fantastic education in hundreds of universities in the US and elsewhere, but it is much easier to get a good education at some of these "name" schools. That doesn't mean the education is easier (it's not; CS is freaking hard at my school), but it does mean that it won't be an uphill battle to get that education.
Perhaps I am just a "college kid". However, the majority of my friends are actually out of college, many of them married with children, so I feel that I have at least a little bit of perspective on this. I know plenty of them who got 6 figures or a high 5 figures out of college, even 5 years ago.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia. Sure, 2 years of Business school might be required after 5 or so years in the work force in order to get a managerial position that really pays bank, but that's far in the future. Places like MS and Google and Yahoo! are hiring kids out of my school at 75k or more a year for software engineering jobs (there is obviously a variance, and some jobs get a lower salary).
Finally, I'm sorry critical thinking was dead at your college, but that is not the case here, and does not seem to be the case at many of the colleges my friends go to. Quite honestly, that seems to be one of the largest differences between some of the "better" schools and some of the lesser-known schools, which is just a sense I get from talking to my few high school friends who went to Ivy or equivalent schools and comparing our experiences to those who went elsewhere. It's not to say that they're not getting good educations, but that level of critical thinking, especially outside of classes, largely seems to be lacking, making some of them really unhappy.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. There are still awesome research opportunities in the military. What about Nuclear research? What about tactical ops? What about intelligence gathering? What about, for something CS related, cryptology? Or programming the tanks, submarines, etc, that will be going out? A lot of this is still done in-house, the people they have doing this are not folks they are going to endanger by putting them in line of fire. This doesn't mean that there is no chance of being shipped out to Iraq, but if you go to the military, especially the US Navy, on an engineering track of some sort, then you can apply to certain jobs when you get into the Navy, and it's not the same blind chance an enlisted man or a new officer who is going to be leading troops will have.
Listen, I don't love the military in any sense, but as a practical choice, it's not as bad as many folks make it out to be. Someone with an engineering degree isn't simply a "warm body" to the military, especially if they're coming straight into the military from college rather than having gone through college after the military in order to become an officer. There are different career paths within the military, especially Navy, that can lead to many different places, and that pay incredibly well.
The problem is, my upper-middle class family had more down to Earth plans for me and my college choices (about $30,000/year more down to Earth, actually)
Pretty he didn't mean his parents would pay $30k, he meant they wanted to pay $30k less than what MIT costs. If they included housing costs, that means $15k/year, if they weren't including that then they would only be offering $5k/year.
Doesn't discount your other points, but I believe clarification was needed.
I suppose I'm just a bit cynical about trusting the military's ability to use people's talents correctly, but I hope I didn't make the military out to be a bad choice, since I came out of it with the ability to step into a decent career. It's probably even a bit better than corporate America in terms of the density of stupid people and bad decisions. And it is true that making a choice like joining the Navy is a good way to avoid landing at a guard shack in Iraq with a rifle.
However, I still don't think the DoD is using active duty military personnel to do a lot of the actual research and engineering tasks, but that's just based on my experience with the Navy. All the people I worked with that were doing those jobs--like nuclear research and power plant design, for example--were civilian employees or contractors, every single one. Maybe they were former enlisted or officers in that field, but they weren't able to do any of the actual "design/build/program something" jobs until they were hired as civilians and put in their time in the civilian side. The active duty officers in those technical fields were little more than supervisors/managers of the enlisted people, and (again, in my limited experience) the enlisted guys actually had most of the direct experience with the technology, while the officers did a lot of admin/paperwork and stood the occasional supervisory watch.
So I still maintain that for 99%+ of the cases, going into the military, with or without a degree, in a technical, not-so-likely-to-be-on-front-lines field, is more likely to result in:
- Spending 8+ hours per day sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
- Supervising somebody sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
- Cleaning something
- Painting something
- Doing paperwork
- Supervising people cleaning and painting things
than in doing research. However, having that experience for 6, 12, or 20 years would put one in a good spot to move on to doing R&D for the military for the equipment you used to work with. It just doesn't seem right to me to pitch the military as a good option for jumping into a research opportunity for anybody except the very top-notch graduates in a field.[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Here is one significant quote from it:
Beyond that, there is something to be said for a formal education. I was "self taught" in high school also, and thought that I would be able to handle any problem. I couldn't have been more wrong, and in my senior year of high school, when I began taking real CS courses, I learned things that I would never have grasped without a teacher. The sort of things I am studying now can't be "self taught," because in at least one case I am learning it directly from the researcher who made the discovery. Overall, a formal education not only provided me with new ways of thinking about my majors and related fields, but it also broadened my ability to solve problems, both in terms of scope and approach.
Going directly into trade after high school is a waste of time and of talent. Is college expensive? Unfortunately, yes. Is it worth the expense? Absolutely.
Palm trees and 8
You may want to look into MIT again. They just announced a couple of weeks ago that students from families that earn less than $75k/yr. will not have to pay tuition. They've also changed the factors they look at to determine financial aid for other income levels:
Fin. Aid Boosted; No Tuition For Families Earning Under $75K
MIT has also always had a policy of basically, "You get in, and we'll help you figure out how to afford it."
A couple more things:
Disclaimer: I graduated from MIT, and would not trade that experience for anything.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia.
As someone who works for a large tech company, let me just say that you've been very misled. The differences aren't immediately obvious, but you need to think a little bit beyond starting salary.
Promotion ceiling. You may start off with a salary that's only 10-15k below someone with an MS, but I have encountered a large number of people who have gone back to school because they can't get promoted without a better degree. In fact, I can't think of anyone I know that's over the age of 35 and doesn't have at least an MS. A large number went back to school after they had kids and continually grumbled about how hard it was with a family.
Job types. Those with BS's are much more likely to find themselves in a low-level position - implementation, support, bug fixing. People with graduate degrees are more likely to be in the design and project lead positions. Not only is this a factor in the promotion issue I already raised, but who do you think is easier to outsource? When times are tough, who are they going to lay off?
Just to emphasize the point, I was planning on stopping with my BS when the .com bust happened, and ended up going back to grad school at a Big 10 university. Applications for graduate schools in 2002 and 2003 were extremely high. High enough that schools were caught off guard when people who they expected to get in to MIT, CMU, Berkeley, etc ended up accepting their offers. Enough accepted that I heard many stories of schools that were overcommitted for financial aid. Unfortunately, I only have one data point for the mixture that were returning students, but around 20-25% of our class were people who had been in successful IT jobs and had gone back to grad school because they had trouble finding jobs. It led to an interesting mix of professional and academic experience.
Now, does this mean that you can't be successful with just a BS? No. Heck, I knew a kid out of high school that was pulling in over 100k managing IT for some small company during the .dot boom. But, he eventually went back to school too.
My point though is that if you want better job security, you want more freedom of action and responsibility, and a better likelihood of higher pay in the long run, the 24 credit hours for the MS is well worth it.