A big question that many students begin to ask themselves as they go through college is, “what’s the point?” I’ve heard phrases like “I’ll never use this class for my job!” and “I didn’t really learn anything in this class” over and over in my 3 years at USC. And 90% of the time I agree. Why did I have to take “Discrete Methods in CS” or “Environmental Issues?” Most of the time I cram for midterms and finals and then forget 90% of the material a month later.
And to further validate it’s worthlessness, I NEVER had to remember anything from either of those classes for anything I’ve faced in life. Why do they make us take it?
My answer to that is: who cares? To be successful in life you need to do what you need to do. Almost every graduate comes to realize that most of the work they will be doing is learned on-the-job, and not in school. But how can you prove to the employers that you’re capable of learning how to do your job if you can’t learn the material to pass a class on environmental issues? It’s about discipline. When you write down your university on your résumé you are being judged on how pretigious that school is, but more importantly, how much you took away from your college education. You may be the brightest kid in your class, but if you have a 2.0 GPA good luck proving that to an employer who tossed your rèsumè into the rejected pile after reading the first couple lines.
I’m not saying that I haven’t learned anything useful in computer science from my major, but I’ve learned a lot more seemingly irrelevant material than directly job-relevant skills. Do I really need to know modular exponentiation or how much work a heat engine can do? I’m not going to be a cryptographer or a physicist, so simply put, no, I don’t need to know it. It was never about WHAT we’re learning, it’s about the concepts you need to understand in order to learn it. Basically, learning those things makes you smarter in general. It trains parts of your brain to understand other related things easier. For example, physics and programming are mathematical in nature. Strengthening my math skills may indirectly improve my programming skills (evaluating an expression is a common concept between these two fields).
It took me until my last year of college to fully understand and accept this system I was born into. If you can’t beat it, join it. A successful person gets an A in that boring class that you absolutely hated, they got that internship that denied your application, and may even later be your boss. Are you going to accept that?
andrewborba 