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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?"
... you'd already released some code. One of the really cool things about code versioning systems is that you can look back over how your project has developed, and see how old bits of code are. This gives you a useful-but-scary indication of how much your programming is improving, the more you do it ;-)
It's easy to get your Free software out there. It would probably look better if you had something you could show prospective sponsors, and this is where the versioning comes in. If you've got a horking great Subversion repository full of your code, with maybe a few checkins a day, then it shows the process by which you work. It's like showing your working on a maths problem - if you get the answer right but don't show your working, you won't get full marks. If you show your working and get the answer wrong, quite often you'll get fairly good marks anyway if the working is right but the mistake was a little arithmetical slip.
So in short, show them the code. And let us know if it gets you into college.
Old school advice...
... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."
First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story.
The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."
Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."
And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They must be, after all you've gone out of your way to post about 10 replies where you praise MIT (and the army up to some point) as the creme de la creme of the higher education you can get. I have this feeling that the way you're defending MIT, you are being a little too overzaelous.
At my previous workplace we had a rule "your degree and where it came from don't matter". I've seen a guy with a university degree in CS be outsmarted on a technical matter by someone who studied history but had a passion for what he was doing. We had a guy fresh out of high school who wanted to work a couple of years to earn some money before heading off to his higher education, and he was better at programming than some "educated" people I've had the "pleasure" to work with.
My point is that while many companies have a tendency to focus on a degree, a lot of companies don't. If you have a talent and you're willing to put that to good use, you'll be presented with enough opportunities. Yes, a degree is important, but 10 years from when you have obtained that degree your experience and achievements are much more important.
Funny ... I never went to college, and have a 6 figure salary, married, and enough 401k money to live on my current salary and never touch principle. And I didn't waste tens (hundreds??) of thousands of dollars in the process (why would any smart person do that?). Instead, I got my ass into the work force right out of high school, and got my employers to pay for the courses I needed to do my job. I was only an office clerk for two years before being moved into IT. I took advantage of every opportunity that presented it self to learn more on the job and take on more responsibility, no matter how 'beneath' me it was. I became an employee that my various companies knew would take on any task and get it done, not whine about not having the right tools or enough people or a thousand other excuses.
.. not true. I went to college for one semester, and after I did the math realized what a waste of money it was. I was very disappointed in the number of stupid people who went there because they were either sons and daughters of parents who could afford it, or got some worthless athletic scholarship. The truly smart scholars were few and far between.
... do yourself a favor and pay attention in high school. It's all you really need if you're smart. You don't want to work for a company that says 'college degree required', they put people into little boxes instead of finding the value in individuals.
... if you WANT to go to college to learn, go for it. Learning is a wonderful thing. But don't buy into to the degree programs. Learn what you want to learn, not what they tell you that you have to learn. Talk to people outside of college and learn what is important. Colleges are businesses, they have other interests than yours in mind when they come up with a curriculum.
Ok
If you're smart, you're smart and don't need college full time. If you're not, the college degree gets you past the HR screener to someone that can figure out whether or you have some skills they might be interested in.
I'm also fucking tired of college kids trying to justify their waste of money by saying 'we are well rounded' or 'we learned critical thinking'. No one gives a crap about that. Can you write code with any degree of skill?? That's all I care about.
To all the CS majors out there, I need someone that can take an 8 year old program that no one has touched in years and the original author is gone, find all the missing header files, get it compiled and fixed. Today. Not next week, today. You don't get to work on the fun stuff the day you start working. Get over it. I need someone with debugging skills and the humbleness to listen when I tell them 'you really don't want to code it that way' and present a more maintainable and stable alternative. Not some crap your college professor thinks works. I'll give you an opportunity to explain why you want to do it, but the end result is I have 20 other developers and I need all the programs to be maintainable, not some creative crap.
To all the high school kids out there
All that said
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.