College is useful for people who want to make the best of it. My freshman year here I got involved with a research group examining virtualization in high performance computing (supercomputing). By the end of my freshman year I had helped write a big patch for QEMU to virtualize Intel HW instructions and implemented the software compatibility layer for Intel in our own virtual machine monitor. In addition to the invaluable experience this gave me (especially in practical C) I also appeared as a coauthor on the VMM paper in a very prestigious systems conference (IPDPS).
In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer.
This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result.
Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming languages.
If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.
I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I do believe we must abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence, and ultimately, their value.
For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you have.
I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally, I'm a fan of the second theory:
In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer.
This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result.
Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming languages.
If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.