3 and half years, it's been that long since I first started at University and it's almost over, honestly, I don't know where the past few years have gone, so much has happened but looking back it feels like no time at all has passed since I left high school.
There are serious problems with the current structure of the University system both on the side of politics and purely in the value of your degree, I'm not going to get into the politics today but I can certainly talk about the value.
So for reference, I'm finishing up a Software Engineering honours, it's by no means the cheapest course out there but it's certainly no Aeronautical Engineering, and I'll be talking about my experience in my degree.
The vast majority of my course material has been either based on free material available online or just straight up a link to some free resource, this is the major issue that seems to hold true for any programming related degree. Either the material is incredibly outdated because you're working from old textbooks or the material is literally just a free resource that you didn't need to pay thousands of dollars to be given a link to.
If you're not in University and have never been you might be thinking this is a symptom of COVID and the change in schooling, but that's not the case at, this is a problem that has been going on for years, from before I started and it'll continue after I finish.
Let's talk about the COVID changes for just a moment, some lecturers decided to perform online lectures (generally through a service like Zoom) but that wasn't the case for all of them. There were 2 kinds of lecturers, one in my experience is more prevalent than the other. You had the lecturers who would record a new lecture from there home to cover any updated material, I like these people they're hard workers and then you had the lecturers who decided to take a holiday and just release the lecture from last year. Releasing old material is fine sometimes (when the lecturer is unable to attend the time slot), but when you're simply getting paid to do your job from home and then decide to not do your job it's a bit more annoying. It turns out that the latter category has been far more common.
Moving onto now, it's the Sunday before my new semester starts, I've been ready to look at my course material for my final 3 courses for about a week now and I simply haven't been able to. Until today only one of my courses has actually been available to view so I've basically just been playing the waiting game until someone remembers to actually release their course page. After being in University for this long, I know this isn't a difficult task, in fact, generally, they just release the same course page from the previous year but with some updates to the due dates.
I've certainly enjoyed my experience at University and I've met some absolutely amazing people, as well as some people who I'd prefer to never see again if I can help it but ignoring those people, overall it's been an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Now the question is, do I think it's worth it? Well for me that honestly depends on whether I'm even going to use my education but assuming you do plan to use it. If you want to get into software engineering there are much cheaper options, such as code boot camps or simply just getting off your butt and learning what you want to learn. But what do I know I'm still in school.
Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk