Slashdot Mirror
Do Geeks Need College?
Manuka writes
"Salon has a neat article
debating the issue of whether college is worth bothering with
for geeks." The article references
an old Slashdot thread
and throws out some interesting comments and statistics
on the subject.
Don't go to college to learn to be a better geek. Academic computer science won't turn you into a system administrator, Web designer, or Perl hacker. You won't learn how to optimize a kernel configuration, recover files from a crashed disk, build a fast database, or tell your boss nicely that his ideas about information technology are stupid or violate the laws of physics. You may learn a lot of good theory -- but you could pick that up elsewhere, too.
Go to college to learn about culture, or history, or philosophy, or literature. Go to college to sit up late nights screaming at your best friends about what an idiot Rene Descartes was. Go to college to watch your best friends do the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Go to college to find out what the hell this postmodernism thing is that Larry Wall's always on about. Go to college to refute postmodernism, and to be called postmodern for doing it. Go to college to meet people who will be impressed with your intelligence instead of thinking of it as threatening.
Don't go to an easy college, and don't go to a place that lets you get by doing nothing but technical stuff. Go to a place that makes you do a lot of heavy reading and writing. Take tough courses. Learn to write well; not only will it help when your boss asks you to document your project, but it'll also help you sound better on Slashdot and USENET. Don't scorn "well-roundedness" or "communications skills"; the stars of geek culture are no bunch of illiterates.
Study music. Music, as Pythagoras demonstrated, is a form of mathematics, and musicians, like hackers, keep pounding on their work in search of the Right Thing. Study psychology and sociology. They represent our attempts to figure out how the systems called the human mind and human society work, so that we can make them work better.
Read Nietzsche. Refute your parents' religion. Then refute your refutation.
Get into politics. Which politics don't really matter -- be a socialist, or a libertarian, or even a Republican if you have to. Go to activist events. Take politics courses. Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes. Derive the Debian Free Software Guidelines from the works of John Locke.
(Damn. I'm rambling. I sound like that fake Kurt Vonnegut graduation address email forward that whoever-it-was turned into a song. Use sunscreen.)