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entries/programming/university-vs-teaching-yourself-programming.md

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+Many people on the internet furiously debate whether it is better to learn how
+to program in college vs teaching yourself. This is not necessarily a one-sided
+debate, there are merits of both teaching yourself how to program and taking
+computer science in college.
+
+University
+==========
+
+The main advantage of taking Computer Science in college is that you are also
+taking a lot of math and science courses. When talking to a professor from
+Clarkson University he said that they were not teaching students simply how to
+get jobs, but how to pioneer and shape the field. It is possible to buy a book
+and teach yourself how to program Python or attend a coding boot camp. However,
+the tech field is changing at a rapid pace, and what you learn now may be
+irrelevant in five years. The combination of programming courses and other math
+and science related courses allows students to create the tech of the future.
+Think about all the advancements in artificial intelligence we have made in the
+past year, all that requires higher level statistics and calculus.
+
+When you are attending a University your professors and friends can help you
+understand the content fully. College also gives you a time to experiment which
+corner of the computer science field you want to specialize in.
+
+Self-Taught
+===========
+
+Most of what I know in the computer science field, I taught myself. I feel that
+it is a virtue to have. Picking up new programming languages or platform over
+the course of a weekend is good skill to have – especially when going into a new
+job. The best programmers are those who are constantly seeking new knowledge and
+learning.
+
+When I was at a career fair I asked multiple companies what they were looking
+for in a suitable candidate. Most employers liked candidates who worked on
+projects outside of school and showed drive to learn new things. However, one
+employer simply said that they looked only at juniors/seniors who have taken the
+Computer Science courses at RIT. I decided to ask her if their company liked
+students who taught themselves additional programming languages. She shrugged
+the idea and said that they typically don’t favor that because people who taught
+themselves programming might have picked up bad practices. This brings up a
+valid point. Computer science courses are laid out to incentivize and favor good
+programming practices. Computer engineering courses are specifically designed to
+teach you good programming practices and working with larger codebases. With
+that said, it is not impossible to teach yourself good practices, however, it
+takes additional work which is not what everybody does. Writing a modular
+program which perfectly readable is different than writing spaghetti code which
+simply works.
+
+The largest advantage to being self-taught is that it is cheaper and faster.
+Over the course of a weekend I was able to teach myself NodeJS and start making
+the framework for this blog. If I would have done that in college it would have
+taken an entire semester or more. Plus, I don’t think there are any college
+courses being offered on NodeJS. The information that you are teaching yourself
+is often newer technology than what is being in college. College courses
+typically take some time to catch up with what industry is currently using.
+
+Conclusion
+==========
+
+If you are a dedicated individual, you will find success in both methods of
+learning programming. I would argue that you should always be learning and
+teaching yourself something new every day; however, a combination of college
+education and self-teaching is the best.