what i learned at UCI
alright, alright… so i’ve been crazy laggin’, but i’ve wanted to write about this for a while…
check this article… the guy who wrote it, Philip Chu, documents his lessons from MIT, and it made me think about what i learned at UCI… certainly there’s a huge gap here, in terms of academics, rankings, cost, and other such things, but what we both really learned isn’t all that different in the end… aside from the Work Alone thing, Philip’s look at software engineering is pretty close to mine in many ways…
so why such a big deal here… why is it that much harder to get into MIT when you learn the same thing at a state school?? i suppose the same could be said between, say, UCI and Cal State Bakersfield… i suppose there is some sort of distinction between the learning that goes on, but i’m not all that sure since i went to UCI for both undergrad and grad school… i think the point i’m trying to make, for those of us who are in the software engineering field, is that software engineers tend to have a similar view on the task of writing software… and, may i point out, that view is completely different from a programmer’s view of writing software…
one of the things i’ve learned so far in the working world is that programmer’s are a dime a dozen, much like the smart people mentioned in Philip’s article… sometimes it seems like it’s no wonder much of the world’s applications are buggy… aside from the fact that we can’t think of all possible scenarios, sometimes i wonder if that whiz kid “hacker” was hired because he could deliver ahead of schedule or on time… i don’t know if i have any right to say that or even draw that sort of conclusion, i just wonder sometimes…
it just makes me ponder the year ahead… where do i want to be next year?? where will i be in a few months from now?? all i’d really want would be to know that i was on my career track, that i was out there getting myself to where i want to be…
question is now, where do i want to be??
-m