NYCPHP Meetup

[Christopher R. Merlo]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 5:02 PM, David Krings <ramons at gmx.net> wrote:

A university is supposed to train interested candidates in a field of choice
> with the goal to make them subject matter experts in that field.


That's actually not true, and your apparent belief in this untruth is
probably what has led to your seemingly very strongly felt distaste for
university education.

The purpose of a college or university is to provide the student with an
education, so that the student may go on to contribute back to society.  An
education involves more than just learning a trade, or a skill.  Moreover,
most experts in any field are usually well-versed in some other field as
well; this is what allows educated people to do things like draw analogies,
or relate to non-technical people.  Physicists must read the classics in
English literature so that non-physicists will talk to them at dinner
parties; this helps with things like professional networking.  (Everyone who
got your job because you know the right non-IT person, raise your hands.
David, look at all those hands!)  No one expects a physicist to be able to
prattle on about Huck Finn like a lit professor; but the physicist shouldn't
just stare open-mouthed, either.  "Yes, Mark Twain was an important figure
in American Literature" will go a long, long way in making friends and
influencing people.  And an English major should take a lab science course
for the exact same reason; in case he finds himself at a dinner party
populated mostly by physicists, knowing at least that there's an inverse
relationship between distance and gravitational pull, even if the English
major doesn't remember or understand that it's an exponential relationship,
can keep him in the conversation long enough to not be embarrassed.

When my programming students complain (and they always do) about how much of
their grade is based on writing, I tell them two things.  First, when I
worked in industry as a programmer, the pointy-haired bosses kept coming to
me for explanations, and eventually asked me to join large inter-department
teams to work on big special projects with all the suits, and eventually
would have asked me to lead those kinds of special projects had I stayed
with that company any longer; and the reason they kept tapping me, over my
colleagues, was that I was an effective communicator, and I was able to
translate plans to code, and feature requests to timetables, but also code
to English, and bug hunts to revised timetables; and I didn't scare the
suits away when I talked to them.  And I owe that to my liberal-arts
undergrad experience, taking a BA in CS, with a creative writing course and
a public speaking course and all the trimmings.  I even made use of
something I learned in a phys ed course, when I was tutoring a
seventh-grader in math last school year.  He really wanted to shoot baskets
more than do math problems, and so I gave him five minutes if he got a few
questions right.  Of course he got those questions right, and off we went to
shoot baskets.  But he had a great deal of trouble passing me the
basketball, and I taught him the bounce pass, the way I learned it as a
college junior.  His mom kept hiring me back to tutor him, because he really
liked me after that (and the grades slowly went up).

The other thing I tell my students is that out there in the real world,
where all you guys are, people judge other people's intelligence, fairly or
not, according to how effectively they communicate, and that the only two
things that make you a better writer are 1) writing a lot, and 2) reading a
lot.

So, anyway, I felt compelled to write, because I'm afraid that people trying
to choose whether to get a college education or not might be misled into
thinking it's something it's not.  The service we provide is not something
you can get anywhere else, and for lots of people, it's the difference
between promotions or not.
$0.02,
-c
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