To set the scene: I wanted to build my own devboard for my own projects. I'm sat here looking at my screen after having opened KiCAD with some of the documentation for an STM32H7 MCU. It dawns on me that I have absolutely zero clue of what I am looking at and have no idea where to start beyond watching youtube. Here I am now writing this.
Now this would be fine under normal circumstances and I would be happy to learn, like I previously did with web dev. Nor would I expect to know how to do it intuitively. However I literally went to university for this subject, this stuff surely should have been covered (it wasn't)? Feeling illiterate, and missing foundational knowledge (and so often across many fields) can't be right?.
I don't mean to write this as a university is a scam type post ... but like is this normal?
Does everyone go through this?
Did their degree actually help them in any meaningful way? Assuming you stayed in the same field of course.
A university degree in any professional field is only the starting point for a lifetime of learning. In my pre-internet days I spent several thousand dollars a year on books and professional journals all of which I read cover-to-cover. With the internet I find all the materials I need with some focused searching.
The only thing that you truly learn at university is how to research, ie ask questions and then find the answers. Being a professional means having the experience to apply your learning to specific outcomes.
For me learning is very much just-in-time. I stumble across something I don't have a clue about, so I research. Typically I come across something that I don't understand, so then I dig into that and so on. Generally I need to get down into the weeds until I connect with something I already know. Then I start building upwards. Pretty soon I hit another thing I don't understand and repeat the exercise.
That’s why I went to uni to do EE/Robotics. I wanted the next step, suffice to say I did not get the next step from university.
I see what you’re getting at though. Just in time learning seems to be the way it will be. It’s just frustrating I don’t even have a base to go off of. Pretty much all my background knowledge has come from stuff I learnt outside of uni.
If your base doesn't help you launch, even in a small way, then you need to go below that base, back towards the fundamentals. I'm sure you learnt about logic gates, digital signals, transmission line effects, power glitches, etc. Unless you went to one of the well funded universities with youngish academics, then what you learnt was probably 5+ years behind the current state of the art. Add to that the years since you graduated. That is the knowledge gap in years that you need to traverse to establish an up to date base.
Until recently, I taught post-grad EE/SE (as an ex-industry, adjunct) at one of the country's top universities. My colleagues were dismayed at the inadequacy of STEM education of the first-year students. Year 1 has become a remedial school. Starting from such a low-level of knowledge 2-3 years doesn't provide enough time to teach all that is required to be successful in industry. In the field of digital electronics you typically need 3+ years of industry experience to become competent. Of course, motivated autodidacts can accomplish far more in far less time.
Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.
But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.
Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.
As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.
[0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
But guess what? Because of my business experience, I love it. I'm incredibly excited about what the project (and potential final product) will be. So, I've been reading anything and everything, testing, exploring, learning. Can you believe we have the access to do this stuff today? It's incredible.
This is how the world works. For example, a few weeks back, I was under the hood of a steam-powered car, analyzing, looking, thinking about how they figured out some of the things they had figured out. What were they thinking historically? How did they feel about this design decision? Who taught them?
Moral of the story: Degrees don't teach this drive; you must nurture it. It's normal to feel lost at sea.
My EE major started with circuit theory, had labs with Arduinos and advanced to digital logic (embedded software) theory along with labs using professional-grade microcontrollers (TI MSP430, I think). Senior design capstone took us through schematic capture + PCB layout and getting a board fabbed. We did the soldering and populating components on the custom boards ourselves. Granted that was using Mentor Graphics and not Altium, which seems to be industry-standard, but it was still relevant and practical coursework.
It should be noted that Arduinos came about to greatly lower the cost of teaching embedded systems engineering. It really took off from there.
I pretty much study every week to keep up with the industry, but I like it, so it feels more like a hobby. I’m not sure I would have the same strength and perseverance if I had quit uni the first year (or if I had never attended uni). This is just me, so YMMV.
If any, I feel like primary and high school are the real “scams”. I think they waste so much time over and over the same topics without going deep into nothing. I think it could be cut by 30% without any repercussions. I don’t recall anything valuable I have learnt in school (all the great lessons were due to my parents)
There's a lot of value on learning about Geography, History, Biology, the sciences, the social aspect of learning and going to a school and so on. It's hard to observe it after you have done it.
It can be possible you feel like you don't remember much, or don't find it useful, but in that scenario, I assume you'd easily be manipulated as you'd have very shallow knowledge about how the world works, despite perhaps having learned "30% more CS" because you just had less high school if it didn't exist.
Of course, there are improvements that could be made to the curriculum of schools, but I believe it's the most important learning lessons that set us up for life is there.
Same goes for chemistry for example. Can’t recall much tbh. My point is that primary/high school could be way more efficient.
To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.
I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.
These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.
I will say that my degree was useful but mostly because a 4 yr degree was required by my job. I could have gotten a 4 yr degree in pottery + 6 months of code monkey school and I could have gotten the same job.
I have the same gripe about k-12 school. !2+ years of school and most people by far can't get a decent paying job once out of school. That's the real scam from my view.