Skip to main content

Study to pass school (aka get credentials) or Study to Learn?

After interviewing a lot of candidates for software development jobs, I am starting to remember the days when I went to school and I am wondering about the following question:

Should students study to pass college or should they study to learn?

This question comes from my concerns that I have about candidates from both great and average universities. There is no direct relation between your skills and your credentials; it is really up to individuals and how they approached studying. When I attended the University of Toronto in mid-90s, I studied Computer/Electrical engineering. This university was considered to be one of the top three universities for computer/electrical engineering program in Canada, and also among the top 10 when compared to big players in US. My parents were willing to pay for me to go to this school even though I had a full scholarship offer with another average university.
Did I make the right choice attending the better school? Are you making right choices now?
Right choices? It all depends on how I approached my studying. If I had studied to only pass and get good credentials from University of Toronto, then my parents’ money was not invested properly. I studied to learn and if that meant that it would actually affect my grade in a negative way, that’s how I approached it. This may not make sense, but we all remember the days from our college when exams had things that you would never apply in real life and in the meantime the courses were also teaching things that were very applicable in real life. If you studied to learn things for long-term gains, then a lot of times you would get in trouble. Don’t misunderstand me here. Yes, there are things that are taught in courses for which you can’t see applications in real life in that given moment, but you need to plow through it and you will see answers to these doubts at the end.
I have also seen the opposite effects. I am talking about schools diving into real life examples too soon without teaching students good fundamentals in that area. If every student approached this, then nobody would be inventing new things; it would just be a game of putting components together. There has to be some golden balance.
Going back to interviews that I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Regardless of your school credentials, you need to have very strong fundamentals and you need to be able to apply those fundamentals at the right time. For example, software engineering is a very wide field these days and it is impossible to have expertise in all the areas. This is where the fundamental knowledge kicks in. When you jump from field to field in software engineering industry, you will not know everything but you will need to apply those fundamentals and learn quickly. That’s where you separate yourself from others.
In conclusion:
Put the credentials of your university aside and use the great things from your school to learn.
Almir Mustafic

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brand New programming language and one solution OR …

Brand New programming language and one solution OR Two existing programming languages, one solution for EACH? I understand that there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your software architecture, team structure, team skills and other factors, but I still want to explain the scenario as it may look familiar to some. Let me explain. Let’s assume that you have microservices and common libraries in two major programming languages. You have some teams who are experts in one and some teams experts in the other programming language. Now you need to come up with a solution for a scenario that all teams will need to leverage. Let’s assume that your cloud platform has an off-the-shelf approach for this but it is supported by a 3rd programming language that your teams do not have much experience in. What is the right thing for your organization and not just from the technical point of view? A) Do you embrace what your cloud platform gives you off the shelf and implement thi...
Post a Comment
Read more

10,000 foot level view in technology

10,000 foot level view in technology: How useful is it? What can be done at this level? If the 30,000 foot level is the CTO level, then consider the 10,000 foot level as the level that software engineering managers and directors operate at. To achieve the success at 10,000 foot level, you as a software engineering manager need to dive deep into technical details, help the team lay the foundation from BOTH organizational and technical side. It is the little moves that get the team to this level. Once the team’s applications and results at that level, then you as a manager have ability to perform the high level analysis and troubleshooting without necessarily being in code on daily or weekly basis. Therefore, your ability to troubleshoot technical issues at the 10,000 foot level is a testament to the great work of your team. Go TEAM !! Almir Mustafic
Post a Comment
Read more

Programming languages to teach students in high-school and university

Python-like or C-like as the language to introduce programming to students in high school and university? The question is: Do you introduce programming concepts to high-school/university students using languages that handle memory and other things for you or do you start introducing all of these concepts in languages like C that require you to understand all aspects. I will tell you what worked for me. I was introduced to programming in grade 10 using Basic programming language. There was a version called Better Basic and also Quick Basic. Then in grade 11 we learned procedural programming in a programming language called Turing (not Turing machine but a Pascal-like language developed by University of Toronto for teaching purposes). Then a year later, I started getting interested in C and C++. As you can see, I eased into the languages that introduced me to NULL exceptions and memory leaks :) With this approach I was not overwhelmed and this set up the foundation for a fun journey ...
Post a Comment
Read more