[Tutor] A slighty off topic question/rant for the experienced.

[Magnus Lycka]

At 11:18 2002-12-18 -03-30, Adam Vardy wrote:
> >> When times were good I dropped out of college and made the "real=20
> money".  Now
> >> I see the errors of my ways but I am now married and have a wife who=
=20
> depends
> >> on me.  Finding time (and money) to go back to school is not easy.  =
So=20
> do it
> >> right the first time.

I have a few almost finished engineers among my friends,
and while they have done all but a little of their education,
it still sticks out as a flaw in them that they didn't manage
to finish properly. I imagine an employer might well wonder if
they will leave their job assignments almost done as well...

I still feel that it might be good to have som experience of the real
world before studying at an academic level. It makes it much easier
to understand the theories if you understand what they represent in
the real world. I felt sorry about my friends who had hardly ever
seen a resistor or a capacitor before they started with the electric
circuit theory. It was just meaningless words to them, and so many
new things at once. I got a solid theoretical explanation for things
I understood fairly well in practice. They got their brains filled
with words that meant nothing for them.

But don't wait too long...

A friend of mine decided to start studying at the university this
fall, at the age of 37. His wife is also going back to her studies.
They have three teen age children who can't exepect a lot of christmas
gifts or summer trips for a few years to come...

> >> What led me on this road was the false belief that since I knew how =
to=20
> write
> >> code college was a waste of time.  Friend let me tell you, knowing=20
> where a
> >> semicolon goes does not a programmer make.  Languages are just a mea=
ns of
>
>What kind of school do you guys praise?  Some kind of university? Or
>some kind of college?  Examples you might compare?

I studied for my M.Sc.E.E. at Chalmers, www.chalmers.se
Good place. At least if you happen to be in Sweden. :)
G=F6teborg is also a nice town with some good Python coders.
Alex Martelli's employer AB Strakt is from there, and
several of the employees studied in Chalmers.

>Do you like to learn abstractly, or practically?

If you really understand something, you can use it practically.
Being able to do something practically might not mean that you
really understand. If you just get a routine in doing routine
work, you might well be unable to apply what you have learned
when the context changes. On the other hand, hands-on experience
might well help you to get a good understanding of theories. I
think a good mix is required.

In my opinion, it's important to try to really understand things. We
all felt (I think) that in the lectures you could either sit and
listen to what the professor said, and try to really understand this,
OR you could write lecture notes, but doing both was too much.
Fortunately where I was studying people we usually selling lecture
notes for a reasonable cost, so I could sit and listen and think.

Many other students spent much more time than I did practicing. In
maths (and most M.Sc.E.E. subjects are math in a form or another)
practicing typically means doing these math assignments in the
books. Hundreds of boring and similar looking exercises. Yuk. I
could rarely do more than a few, and I rarely made any "high scores"
on the exams.

Once though, I felt that a math exam went better than usual. An
unusually simple exam it seemed to me. When I was walking down the
tunnel of sighs (which was the popular name of the corridor where
the maths department displayed exam results) I saw a few of the guys
who had previously scored 23-24 out of 25 on these exams. I was
normally happy with my 17-18 points. They weren't sighing, they
were almost crying, complaining that the exam was sooo difficult,
and wondering who the hell 3-87-4168 was (no names were posted)
who managed to score 23 on this exam from hell. Of course I got
curious when I heard my Chalmers id number like that.

Later I asked the Ph.D. student who wrote the exam in what way it
was different from other exams. He said "Well, I didn't want it to
be a typical exam, looking exactly like these Math C exams aways do,
so I varied the questions a little, combining things and formulating
things a little differently. This tend to confuse students, so as a
compensation, you have to lower the level of the mathematics a bit."
This slightly lower level was obviously the reason I scored higher
than usual (and a little luck). The difference from "typical" exams
didn't bother me, since I didn't practice enough to know how a
typical exam would look. (I'm sure these guys did four or five old
exams from previous years when they were preparing. Probably exhausted
when it came to exam...)

For them, the confusion from being slightly different (something I
never noticed) penalized them about twice as much as the simpler
mathematics helped them. These guys scored 17-18 points as I used
to do... :)

It turned out that my friends had not really studied how to solve
mathematical probelms, they had worked very hard trying to learn how
to solve maths exams, something people do very rarely after they
graduate. I don't think they even understood the difference. Not then.
Maybe when they had to face the real world...

It's really interesting that they were so completely lost when the
things they (thought they had) learned was placed in a slightly
different context. It's as if they would never recognize a wolf if
it wore a sheep fur on its back...

It was the same with a physics exam we had. I overheard the same
always-best-in-class guys complain about a problem I solved in three
lines. They wrote page up and page down and couldn't solve it. "Did
the professor really talk about circular polarization?" they asked.
I had never made any calculations on that, but we had the formula book.
I looked at polarization, and there we had "elliptical polarization".
I found a formula that I could easily twist into an expression giving
me the value they asked for from the values they gave. I was lacking
an angle though, but I guessed that the angle must describe the
proportion between the big and small axis in the ellipse, so I just
assumed it had to be 45 degrees (well, pi/4 radians) for a circle.
That was all. Copy formula. Note that circle leads to theta =3D pi / 4.
Enter values and type result. I thought it was the simples question
in the exam.

I surely hope these other guys (who were three years younger than me,
fresh from secondary school) saw the light eventually, otherwise I fear
that my idea that you learn how to learn and how to solve problems in thi=
s
education is not true.

For me it was a big help to have worked for a year as an electro technici=
an.
It meant that what I learnt in school wasn't all new. It explained phenom=
ena
I was well aware of. To get there without that experience would have been=
 a bit
like studying colour composition if you are blind from birth.

> >> * learn one of each type of language.  Learn Lisp or Forth or=20
> ML.  Break your
>
>It's not likely you'll find books on those things.

Sure you will! On the net even. There have been links to some free
Lisp family books already. For ML, the French OO variaty OCaml might
be interesting. See http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/

I don't know about Forth, I used to code some FIG-Forth on my old
C-64 back in the 80's. It feels a bit ... old? But perhaps I'm being
stupid. It's certainly a useful language in some niches, for instance
in small embedded systems. I think there are still cheap microcontrollers
that can be programmed in Forth. (See http://www.pmb.net/projects/68HC11.=
html)



--=20
Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
Alvans vag 99, SE-907 50 UMEA, SWEDEN
phone: int+46 70 582 80 65, fax: int+46 70 612 80 65
http://www.thinkware.se/  mailto:magnus@thinkware.se