At the end of my big European trip in 2007 I overnighted in London. I didn’t have a hotel, but I was still in one of the greatest cities on Earth. However, I did nothing. There was such potential that I didn’t take advantage of.
For me, I know it as the time I wasted a night in London.
I am currently trying to do a major clean up of my home. Spring cleaning? No stone left unturned? I’ve gotten to the book section where I am doing a purge.
I’m coming across some old textbooks from university. These I’m looking closer at, in case there is any that have knowledge I feel I should be able to reference.
What I’m rapidly learning is that I wasted a university education.
Now I’m not saying that it a waste to get a university education. I’m saying that there was such potential that I didn’t take advantage of.
There were many courses I didn’t take that I should have. There were many courses I took that were useless, and I didn’t even want to take. They “taught” me things that I can’t even think of what real-world applications they could have been for.
Now, I’m not sure how much choice I had with my courses. I was not making a concrete decision to be in computer science. I started with mathematics, so those courses came first. But even when I got into computer science I always seemed to be only able to choose the courses at the tail end of the selection period. So my choices were limited to what was left.
I also took Honours courses, which seemed to be more geared towards theory instead of practical matters. It did not include the course on graphics, which I would dearly love to have taken. I consider myself lucky that I was able to get into a database course which my entire career seems to have used. Same is true for C++.