The things you can't learn at college.

[Crenshinibon]

I'm currently attending a school for my second year and there is a pressing worry that by the time I graduate, I won't have any knowledge about my major, which is Networking.

Last year I took eight courses and I can't say that I learned anything aside from programming which is useful for scripting in the field that I'm in. Looking at the courses I'll be taking, I learn no PHP, Perl or any of that either. I do have two co-ops in my last two years there, in which I may hopefully pick something up.

Still, it's not that comforting when this year, my professor for Computer Architecture cancels all Monday classes for the rest of the semester. x.x I'm primarily trying to focus on the courses required for my major as the electives most likely not aid me in any way when I'm in the job world.

What would be a good thing to do at this point?

[Curry]

What would be a good thing to do at this point?

Quit school and get a job or stop whining

[Argonian Thief]

Quit school and get a job or stop whining

That was a bit mean :S, he was just asking.

[Crenshinibon]

It's not whining, it's being concerned.

[dragon wench]

Quit school and get a job or stop whining

So tell us... do you take special lessons at being so extraordinarily diplomatic or is it an innate talent?

[Tricky]

Totally depends where you're from as well. In Brazil you can get away with it, but in Holland you can't really get any job without some minimal kind of degree. It's literally the difference between picking garbage from the streets and earning fifty thousand a year. An acquaintance of mine came here from Brazil and was not so pleasantly surprised that he had to spend the first year cleaning dirty toilets.

But an increasing amount of young people here don't finish their degrees, or fail to pay off their college loans in time before they bankrupt themselves. It's something of a recent problem, or at least one that's been getting more media attention. So contrary to most people here I still think it's a better idea to spend at least one year doing something else before attending college. Working, traveling, anything to get a better sense of what you want from life. So hopefully then people can make the right choices at the right time.

[C Elegans]

It's not whining, it's being concerned.

If you are serious about your future career, quitting school is very bad advice. I don't know where you live, but in Europe, employers are increasingly demanding that people in the IT/computer field should have a university degree. Gone are the old days when home-made hackers made it to qualified, well paid jobs.

It seems to me that at this point, your alternatives would be either to change school, or to find people who can help you to learn what you need to learn on your own.

In general, I do agree with Tricky though, that young people should take a year or two off before going to uni, for the same reasons as he states.

[Bloodstalker]

My experience was that I never learned as much in the classroom as I did outside of it, especially in the first year or two. I worked in networking for several years and took classes as well at college, but while I did lean a bit in class I learned a lot more by getting on in the computer dept of the college I was attending. It started out as work study, then became mostly a full time job including summers and breaks as I got better.

If you do get to work internships or co-ops, I guarrantee you will learn more doing that than you will in your other classes combined. I found that classes were great for the standard explanations and basic stuff, but the real meat of your value in the feild is going to be in troubleshooting things when they go wrong. There is no way a college course can prepare you adequately for that. They teach you how things work and stuff like set-ups and all, but there is no way they can really cover everything that can go wrong.

Nobody is going to hire someone with a four year degree in networking and expect them to take over the entire dept, or at least they shouldn't. You will learn quite a bit in internships, and any job you take after college will likely train you themselves as well. A degree gets your foot in the door, and tells an employer you at least have a background in networking and are more likely to be able to learn to do the job well than not. The do not, however, expect you to come in the door ready to do everything that needs to be done. In fact, that generally causes the most problems with new employees fresh out of college. Some of them think they already know everything they need to know, and it makes them harder to train and work with.

If you are still worried, and can afford it, I recommend setting up your own network at home. If you have a couple old computers laying around, set them up as a network and then proceed to break and fix everything you can possibly think of. Even let some people come in and mess around with it while you aren't there. My freind and I used to do that in college on old outdate machines. I'd break his, and he'd break mine. Also consider buying a few books on things your college desn't seem to be going to cover. A lot of these books can be purchased that include training versions of the software they cover. You can buy books on networking software with disks that will allow you to create and manage a virtual network on a single computer by similating a mmultiuser environment. There aren't always overly expensive either.

It may not be applicable for you, but many colleges also hire student employees in their computer dept. You might want to check into that as well.

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it too much. You will learn quite a bit in internships, and whatever company hires you will teach you more. You will also soon find out that most of the actual job involves plugging people network cables back into their machines after they come loose, turning the power button on when a printer isn't working or a dozen other things like that. In addition you'll do a lot of routine things dealing with group memberships and such that will become second nature very quickly.

The point is, a lot of the work is just mundane stuff, and you will likely have people there to help you with anything more than that for the first little bit of any job you get after school. One of the guys I worked with described computer networking as being 85% sheer boredom and 15% sheer terror when thing do go really wrong.

Just my two cents here, but I really believe most college students tend to overestimate what an aducation means to a potential employer. Yes, it is important and does show you have some experience in the field, but no good employer is going to expect you to be at a high level in actual hands on field work frsh out of school. They have every expectation they will have to undertake some amount of training when they hire you. They just don;t have to do quite as much of the basics and are more reassured you will pick up what you need to know pretty quickly once you get on the job with a degree.

[Nightmare]

Being in my fourth year of my undergrad, I think its safe to say that school doesn't really teach you the skills you'll need (depending on the field)...but the degree is definitely necessary these days to get a fairly decent job. The B.A. has more or less replaced a high school diploma as the bottom requirement for most jobs. Quite frankly, the degree is more important than most knowledge you'll get out the school. But, as Bloodstalker said, what matters most to employers (at least to mine in the various jobs I've taken during school) is outside experiences and the quality of work you're known for, not your education.

And, about electives, they may not help you directly in your field or major, but they can be good ways of expanding your knowledge base. For instance, I'm in Political Science, but have taken some electives in Biology and Physics. Its helped me write papers and give different points of view on some public policy subjects where most students have a more narrow interpretation.

[Skorm's Reaper]

If you have spare time, try and learn those things they don't teach you at school when your at home.

Skorm's Reaper