Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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