disorganised university rant

every time i bring up my university i always turn it into a rant on how much i hate it there. cause i really do - i think it’s a colossal education failure and im so miserable because of it.

• when i was still studying diploma, the main complaint is always depth. i hated going to uni every day to listen to a lecturer teaching stuff i already know, or stuff i would rather just read on my own instead of wasting 2 hours absorbing it slowly.

• the second biggest complain are the groupmates. like, they can’t code, they can’t complete their tasks on time. they ask really basic questions they should have googled/chatgpt’d. then they don’t communicate when they don’t know. maybe they’ll put together some junk near the deadline, maybe i’ll decide to be generous and do their tasks for them.
  • i still think it’s inexcusable to be this bad at coding, but in hindsight, it’s hard to really blame them. the difference between someone who can or can’t code is bigger than you’d think. it was unreasonable for me to expect them to be able to just force themselves to do what i do - i was desperate to blame something in a situation where we really don’t have enough good programmers.
  • in hindsight, it’s a skill issue on my part. i wasn’t the programmer that i thought i was. if i was, i would have been able to easily do everything on my own.

• the assignments are never fulfilling. i love my personal projects to death but i feel like dying whenever i have to work on the assignments. the assignment questions are just… assignment questions. i don’t know if anyone could take pride and joy in an inventory manager made in java swing where you store everything in csv files because you’re not allowed to use databases.

• speaking of which, i hate the arbitrary restrictions too. the reasoning is that you’re supposed to only use what you’ve learn in class. this would be more reasonable if they taught everything you actually need in class, but they don’t. maybe it’s because the programmers are too new for anything advanced - for example, there’s a web dev module where it’s the students first time learning html, css, sql, and php all at once. like, i hated how they never taught basic stuff like sanitizing your sql queries or let us use frameworks, but that would have been overwhelming. things have improved on degree though - the modules tend to be more practical, the assignments tend to be more open ended - and therefore, fun.

• assignments often require knowledge that are taught near the end of the module. meaning: you either have to start your assignments late, or learn early on your own. of course, a good student would chose the latter… but when you do, what’s the point of the classes?

• you’d think the problem of depth wouldn’t matter in degree, where the difficulty and depth is significantly bumped up. unfortunately, they’ve chosen to prioritise breadth over depth. like, to their credit, each module do have a decent amount of depth now; but there are so many modules it gets super duper overwhelming. the assignments also are so overwhelming now i can’t focus in class properly, i just go to classes to do assignments now.

• the idea of having this many modules seems flawed. are you just expected to round-robin the modules and assignments in your head? cause i can’t. there’s so much overhead involved with switching. i can’t even worry about schoolwork properly in my free time, there are 8 different things and i have to choose one to worry about.

• their idea of breadth also seems flawed. most modules don’t really have much to do with your specialization anyways. i have no idea why they don’t teach stuff like version control. if you want breadth you might as well teach something everyone needs to know?

i know that everyone says “it’s no longer high school, you’re on your own, you have to rely on yourself”. i don’t disagree, i just think it shouldn’t be this way, considering how much we paid for the education.