

Should I drop out? - alansparrow

Hello,
I am a student major in Computer Engineering and I am in 3rd year now. I have been following Hackernews for a long time because I am interested in technology and start up. I really love learning practical technologies which I can see their  result immediately. Gradually, what I am self-learning  are divergent from what I am taught in my university (I am self-learning iOS game development, Node.js... and I think you have already known what our university is teaching us). This makes me headache because my time is limited, I feel I cannot do both well. Therefore, I consider drop out and focus on self-learning. Does anyone have the same experience? Can you share what you did then? Thank you.
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mc_hammer
stay in school. buckle down and put your school and social happyness first.

make games on the side. game programming is very relevant to other tech,
development processes, bugfixing, optimizing, security issues, anti-cheat
methods, etc are often more straight-forward in game programming than in other
places. for example you never have to optimize a php app until it has tons of
users... so maybe, less php developers optimize code than game developers,
etc. also not as many ppl know how to write networking and 3d code, so it is a
great place to start if you want to end up with a great job/skillset.

if you want to drop out my advice would be not drop out until you have a job
lined up.

having a 40hr/week job + commute and trying to work on the side feels exactly
the same as having class. too much to do and limited time. trust me.

~~~
alansparrow
Thank you very much. The last line is very reasonable ;)

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katm
Stay in school, but don't worry too much about grades. Spend as much time as
you can working on projects that interest you. You're also in a great position
to meet the people you might want to build something (like a startup) with in
the future.

