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What was your favorite course of study? (yeah, it's biased -- do your best!)
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)
Seeing this survey made me realize that this year will mark the 30th anniversary of my graduation from college.
My favorite subject was Computer Science, that being my major. Back then we had classes where we built our own D-flip-flops, and used breadboards to construct basic circuits. This was so we'd understand what the fuck was really going on at the machine level. From what I've seen of recent graduates, colleges don't do things like that anymore, at least not for the software folks. (maybe some high end place like MIT still does, but not the run-of-the-mill programmers I've had to deal with lately) Of course back then they made the freshman computer courses use punch cards, although no one did in 'real life' even then. At the time I thought the profs just wanted us to know their pain, but with the wisdom of age I realize it was probably just that the punch readers hadn't been fully amortized yet.
Back then, what I enjoyed about building software was that you got to do everything. C was (and still is) my first software love, there was nothing the machine could do that you couldn't tell it to do. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and too many programmers can't keep track of memory use or pointer logic. We'd have to build our own data structures, from scratch, every program! Ah, youth. Now all that stuff is prepackaged, and programming is boring as hell.
I'm retired now, and long since fell out of any real personal interest in software. Writing software and designing database for 30 years'll do that to you, I guess. I got tired of yet another hotshot new hire coming in and telling us how we should put everything in the cloud... feh. Soul dead now, I guess.
The only other subject I liked in college was a 3-quarter series on Greek and Roman history and culture, Classics it was called then. The course was a good prof, one the rare ones, although it took her a while to comprehend that, yes, the sole computer science major in her classes really did understand and enjoy that stuff. She even tried to convince me to change my major, in my senior year to boot, but I couldn't even learn French in high school, let alone the Latin -- and Greek! -- that a real classicist would have to learn.
I'm rambling. I'm old, we do that. I'll stop now, so feel free to castigate and deride me now. It seems to be in vogue these days.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2018, @09:44PM
Dude! Class of '88 - BS from a major private institution. The main thing I learned in those 4 years is that "the man" can raise tuition from $10K per year to $20K per year in the space of 4 years, just because they want to and people were apparently willing to pay.
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