Get Well Soon
I'm sorry to hear about mbp's accident, but I'm
glad to hear that he's okay. Get well soon, Martin!
The Idea of a University
This little thread about higher education is actually
fascinating to me. I recall when
Seth Schoen and I
spent a couple hours on a trunk call between California and
Massachusetts discussing this very thing. I explained why I had left
the University of San Francisco, and also why I had attended in the first
place.
Here begins a story...
My parents are both hopeless academics, polyglots, and renaissance
types. My father speaks ten languages with comfortable fluency, and
can bluff his way through almost any foreign country on Earth. He's a
philologist, classicist, librarian, and holds two masters degrees. My
mother is the lightweight as far as academic credentials go, with only
three or four languages and a single lousy masters. Of course, she
also has some programming experience and definitely has a head for
numbers and computation that my father seriously lacks.
It was just assumed that I would go to a four-year university and
possibly graduate studies after that. My mother, having programmed
only on mainframes to make ends meet, was horrified that I wanted to
study computer science. Her basic problem was that it seemed like a
trade school education. Her experiences with programming were more
like factory work. She completely ignored the word "science" in the
phrase "computer science", and begged me to study something sensible
and enlightening like history or politics or even, God forbid, math.
She could understand mathematics as a field fit for a University. CS,
however, was relegated in her mind to lowly colleges and trade
academies and night schools. Being her son, I understood why she
wasn't happy. I also had this feeling that I was missing some piece
of the computing puzzle. I had learned Pascal and C syntax, but still
wasn't able to figure out how people put it all together to make
programs. I was missing The Right Thing. I was missing the AHA
phenomenon.
So I set off South for San Francisco, determined that in a school with
only a couple thousand people, I was bound to be able to chat with
professors and find the science in computer science. I would have my
AHAs, meet and hack with other geeks, and generally get out of my
parents' house.
I did find a small community of geeks at
USF, but they were all in the Math
and Physics departments. The CS students all had dollar signs in
their eyes, and were trying to learn a trade. I was heartbroken. My
mother had been right. There were no CS hackers at USF, and I would
be stuck among those who had no hacker spirit.
I finally figured it out when someone quoted Don Marti to me the other
day: (to paraphrase) "You have to be a fool to go to college during an
economic boom.".
It's not so much that there are so many opportunities to be found
outside of school, or that there is gold in them thar hills. The real
problem is that during an economic boom, the quality of fellow student
tends to go way down. All of your colleagues are looking to get a bit
of the gold, and are less interested in The Right Thing than they are
in What Industry Wants.
So, discouraged, I communicated with my friends back in Seattle and
hacked around on my own. Finally I discovered the Unix admin
department at school, and installed slackware on an old 486 in order
to impress them. They seemed like hacker folk -- arrogant, confident,
and most of all clued-in. They enjoyed what they did with machines,
and they were good at it.
What's more, I discovered in the free software community a feeling I'd
had for quite some time. The reason I wanted to learn CS and hacking
was that I had seen the community of hackers that worked on Citadel
BBSes in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Citadel BBS
software was public domain, and the source code was just sort of
naturally available. What's more, the Citadel BBSes networked and
formed a forum for discussing desing and implementation issues of the
code. I wanted to be a part of that, and I was crushed when the BBS
scene seemed to vanish around 1995.
Ultimately, I got a student job with the USF Unix admin department
that lasted the last year and a half I was there. I worked as
a SysAdmin there until my tuition money ran out and I had to just
strike out on my own. I realized that the hackers I had found were
all the folks at the CABAL,
and that I was doing all the things I had wanted from school, but
entirely independently.
I will say this, however: moving to San Francisco was a good thing,
and school was definitely a good excuse to move. Also, I did get that
AHA! effect from the place. I got some good courses in (especially the
Applied Mathematics Research Laboratory, where I learned
neurochemistry, a little more calculus than I would have liked, and
parallel programming with the MPI environment). It wasn't a complete
bust. Heck, I even learned assembly programming and systems hacking
there.
What will I do in future? Well, if things calm down, or the economy
takes a turn for the worse, I'll go back to school. I'd like to study
something other than computers, of course. To tell you the truth, my
idea of a University is a place where one just studies whatever is
interesting at the urging of an advisor. Declaring a major is just
too limiting to me. I am, however, interested in the prospects of
going to grad school at MIT without having an undergraduate degree.
If I had an impressive enough research project to warrant it, I'd give
it a try.
Well, I've got a little black notebook with a vinyl monkey sticker on
it that is calling to me. I'm still working on the design of
MonkeyCit. It's still beginning to gel, but I'm at the stage where I
should start banging in code soon.
Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the title of this journal
entry comes from. It was featured heavily in my debates with my
mother.
