---
title: "Dropping Out"
date: "2023-05-09"
---

A rant about my experience in my university's computing program.

_Note:_ This isn’t meant as advice, a cry for help, or mercy. I’m not trying to paint my school in a bad light, nor excusing my actions (or inaction). I just want to rant and get this off my chest.

Back in middle school, I found myself downstairs in my family’s kitchen. I don’t exactly remember what I said, but I ended up breaking down and crying about how I didn’t understand the need for homework. Of course my parents told me that people regularly need to do stuff they don’t necessarily believe in. Suffice to say, I don’t think my opinions about education have changed much since then. I, of course, like many people in my family enrolled in universities and colleges in the hopes of getting a degree, and a real career in my field.

My career would be software engineering. I didn't choose Computer Science  though, but instead Information Science[^1] due to lack of funds and time. I'm also not the greatest theorist or mathematician, both of which are a significant part of it. For that reason, I also just wanted a bachelors - I had no interests in becoming a post-grad. I also didn’t go to my current school for the full term. I went to a community college, which I would later look at fondly. It should be noted that while I didn't accrue debt to enter my school, and one of my parents would help pay for classes (I paid through community college, and some of the first early classes if I remember correctly).

I don't know if it's just some problem with me, but the computing courses were the _worst_. Throughout the program, I didn't feel a sense of progression[^2] nor did I feel like any classes actually helped me. Learning how to write a if statement in C, Java, and JavaScript wasn't new to me and most of the courses would be taught out of online materials anyway. I actually _enjoyed the business courses_ for my minor more than most of the computing track.

I had this one group project where we had to make a web application using ASP.net and I was in a group with two other people. Not to fault them on a personal level, but they were *not* ready for this at all. I ended up writing most of the application, and rewriting whatever they gave me because  it was barely salvageable.

A presentation was required at the end of the class, where we needed to produce a short video demonstrating the application. Naturally, I had to poke and prod them to get into a Discord channel - **and we got started at 8 pm**[^3]. What came next was... not the greatest four hours. They had little public speaking experience[^4] so it was difficult getting clean audio from them. I also had to edit the whole video which I only uploaded **within seconds** of the submission window closing. Some error occurred in OBS too, which caused the video to be corrupted, but the audio was intact. I distinctly splicing up screenshots because I didn’t have to re-record. As far as I know, they passed the course.

I’m not exactly the best at valuing my time, and given the option I would much rather work to make money, refine my hobby skills or relax instead of going to school. As the semesters went on and I gradually became disillusioned, I just stopped going to certain classes - namely the boring programming ones. I also don't have a stable source of transportation, I don't have a car or a license[^5] and public transportation in my city is too slow. I usually depended on my partner to drive me to and fro, which is not enjoyable for either of us depending on the traffic.

Of course this eventually bite me and in one class I didn’t come for the last half of the semester. I almost forgot to present my final project, so I quickly whipped up something the day before. I stepped into the classroom on the final day for presentations, and asked the professor if I could present. Naturally, he was wondering who the hell I was! I did pass that class, which in retrospect... I probably shouldn’t have. I think that just fed into my escapism even more.

The worst team, by far is one for a class that spanned two semesters. Team members, if you’re reading this I have no personal vendetta against you, but this was absolute insanity. I’m sure you’re all good people outside of this class.

This project consisted of building a product for a local non-profit, and it was a “real” product that they would need[^6]. The project in question was already specified for us, but we still needed to contact the client for information and requirements. It wasn’t until later, that I realize that the software lifecycle process taught in class was surprisingly accurate! This was a team of four people, including myself. And for clarification, **everyone in this class is doing a computing degree** and isn’t somehow taking it as an elective.

Like any team, we needed a leader - which I quickly took the spot of. I'm not sure why exactly I did though. At first everything seemed fine, but as the semesters grew long - my patience shrank. We held client meeting every few weeks, but I would end up asking the majority of questions and defining the requirements. The few questions that other team members asked, were either frivolous technical details that the customer didn't care/know or duplicate questions already answered. Later in the semester, team members would regularly not show up to these meetings leading to some awkward excuses.

Another part of the course was meeting with the professor to show off our work. It was individual-based presentations, but we were all in the same video call so he could address the whole group if needed. It should be no surprise, I would regularly get stood up by team members and the professor would ask where they are. Sometimes team members would be extremely late, or not show up at all - but I kept trying to bail them out. Most of the class was mostly boring office work-level documentation though, which was somehow still painful to get everyone to collaborate on. Even when I laid out the specific parts everyone needs to do, I would regularly get duplicate submissions from when two team members did the same exact topic.

In another class, the students got into an argument with the professor. I actually liked his classes, but this argument kind of rubbed me the wrong way. This was a new course so the professor didn't have an exact schedule planned out, so assignments would show up three or four days before they are due. One student asked if the date could be pushed back, but the professor snapped and declared that students should be dedicating all of their time to their education. I'm not sure about you, but I couldn't imagine _anyone_ in the class having enough time to dedicate themselves to education as he imagines. At that time, I was still working at my old job where I left at 7 AM and came back at 4 PM Friday thru Sunday, and was physically exhausting. Some students also take fuller course loads, and classes don't typically exist in a vacuum. Just something about his comments rubbed me the wrong way, did we attend the same university education system?

Back to the team, we had one team member that could actually code - meaning I didn’t need to rewrite whole chunks of their code so it’s usable. Of course that really helped, but ideally two people shouldn't write the whole project. As for the other two team members, I couldn’t fathom how they got this far into the computing track and this is a **senior** course. One of them usually started at the main function, read every line and couldn’t understand dynamic programming without some help... okay. That would be fine if this was Programming 1, but considering we had to pump out features *weekly* this was a little bit of a slowdown. Another time as I was pushing them to complete something before a presentation, I'm _pretty_ sure they gave me a LLM response or something copied from a tutorial because it was weirdly well written but they also couldn't explain how it worked. Huh.

The other team member I could never fully grasp their skill because they were almost never in class and contributed very little code. We usually spent more time fiddling with the IDE than actually getting any work done, and getting the team on the same page on how to use Git was exhausting.

We had our first in-class presentation in the second semester, and our professor thought it would be more interesting to watch as we saw each team back to back in person. Suffice to say, we were *not* ready to present - so I did **the wrong thing** and became a hero, and quickly wrote one of the application's major features. It was able to capture photos from another device (typically a phone) and have it automatically recognize text[^7], with that result being stored in a database for further use. This was actually surprisingly complex to implement, and I felt like I genuinely learned something. It felt good because my team congratulated me on how well it worked, but honestly I'm not sure if that was the right move. Their contributions to the presentation I also had to help piece together and make it work well, of course. One team member _didn't even have anything to show_.

Shortly after, I got hired at a software engineering firm. However at this point, I would barely go to my classes. Still, I would use the missed class time to contribute patches, and work for the company. Even before I stopped going, I would regularly use lecture time to code. At that point, I just didn’t care anymore. I had a job and I simply avoided the reality that I *will* fail those classes if I didn’t attend. I'm sure you can guess what happened next...

I don't really know what to say or do, I'm just tired of wasting my time. I'm tired of helping people pass courses they probably shouldn't pass. I'm tired of learning knowledge that I learn better online, or from a real programming book. I know I'm extremely privileged to even consider this choice, I know some people do not. I still don't think it's worth my time though.

[^1]: Explaining the differences between these is actually really annoying.

[^2]: To be fair, I have done a majority of my life programming on my own which could bias this.

[^3]: At least here in the USA, most classes have assignments due at midnight.

[^4]: Even though at this point, they should have had taken a speech course and maybe even did a formal presentation.

[^5]: And not a vested interest in getting either, to be totally honest.

[^6]: I have no idea if these organizations actually use systems students would build for them, but the idea was to give a process similar to one used in software companies. I have a suspicion that these systems wouldn't last very long.

[^7]: Using a cloud service of course, it wasn't actually part of the project to develop an OCR library.
