Though I hadn’t realised this at the time, by far the most damaging part of being in the wrong program in the long term was that I had essentially nothing in common with any of my classmates. I’ve heard that it is not unusual for people to form lifelong friendships during their undergraduate years, but I barely interacted with anyone else in the program. Their goals were completely different from mine, as were their attitudes towards learning.
While there were a few guys at the top of the class who were actually passionate about some specific subject, most of the rest of the class wanted only to memorise enough equations, and for long enough, to pass their tests and do well on their assignments. More than once, I have heard, “What are you still studying that for? We don’t need to know that any more (or, until the final exam).” I suppose that this isn’t a problem specific to engineering, but is a flaw inherent in the customary manner of dividing up the topics in a course into units, with an assignment or a test focusing only on the topics in that unit after it has been covered.
But the problem was exacerbated by the rapid succession of topics, due to the nature of the Engineering Science program; I think it would have been much less severe in a program focused on only one subject. In defense of the program, though, this “flaw” could actually be a feature: the ability to absorb new ideas rapidly, while being willing to discard or put aside ideas which are no longer of immediate relevance, is a useful skill in many careers.
But I think that the program provided a very poor environment for training someone who wanted to focus on theory. The theoretical parts of the computer science classes brought bitter complaints from my classmates. Their comments about Scheme and the λ-calculus reminded me of my father’s dismissive remarks about theoretical computer science: that they were “useless”, “silly”, and so on. I suppose that from their perspective they had a point, as most of them would be programming in C/C++ or Java when they graduated, if they continued to program at all. So even though we may have covered some of the same content taught in the computer science program, the environment was not socially conducive to studying those subjects, and I had a much more difficult time with them than I should have.
A large part of the reason I did so well in elementary school and high school was that I was surrounded by people who shared similar interests, whether it was classmates, older students, or teachers. In university, that advantage was removed from me by the fact that I was in a program that was completely unsuitable for someone with my interests and background.
– davinci
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