I have recently been admitted to Penn State for Computer Science major, and needless to say, I’m taking the offer.

For those of you that do know me, this might have come as a shock, since I have been so vehemently opposed to going to college back when I was in high school. Surely you remember my speech in Mrs. Palmer class about how if you truly want to learn, you can just read, research, do it yourself, and then take a test (in this case, AP tests) to prove your knowledge instead of wasting your life in honor classes. To me, I felt like college was a waste of time, was a waste of money, that I would rather spend my times self teaching myself rather than wasting 2 years of my life learning gen ed. I hated the idea of college, I hated the thought of being evaluated by my grade instead of my skill, my portfolio, and my passion.

Admittedly, even now, I still hold a little bit of resentment toward college. I still hate general ed, but otherwise, I’m actually looking forward to attending Penn State — with a positive outlook. For the most part, my negative opinions of college have became either neutral or positive as I experience life; I can understand why a college degree is actually a pretty good investment, especially if you are in an economically beneficial field. After all, I did took about half a year off after high school, working on personal projects/app, and applying to local programming jobs in my area, without much success.

Before I go any further, I think I need to explain that I’m not against college as much as I’m against myself going to college. I have quite high self esteem, arrogantly high. I believe that I’m smart enough to get a job without a college degree, at least a programming job. I think I’m so damn smart that I can learn all the information I need from just reading, that I’m smart enough that I can teach myself, and that my intelligence is above average. Don’t get me wrong, I still think most people should go to college, especially if they are going into medicine and science, I just didn’t think I should go to college. I dreaded the thought of learning at a really slow pace, of being bored, of meeting people who are there because their parents want them to, but they have no interest, of being bind and gagged down by senseless social justice nonsense that I’m required to take to be “cultured”.

That is not to say I didn’t have any fundamental problems with colleges, though a lot of those problem lies within the people who go to college rather than the college itself. I think people who get a degree in things like gender studies, hell, even psychology (because of the sheer amount of people who want to be a psych major), make college so much less appealing to me. They get a degree in an oversatured/lack of market field, then complain about being unable to get a job, and then complain about student debt. There are also way too many people in colleges; people think that if they get a college degree, they will automatically get a better job, and thus making better money. I think that is really naive, and in theory it cause more harm than good. In a perfect utopia, everyone would be going to college and have a degree, and everyone would graduate and have a degree and searching for a job. Employer wouldn’t know who to hire because they all have a degree, so instead of having a requirement being a bachelor degree, now they are going to raise the requirement to master, to get only best candidate. Plus, not every job require a college degree, and I would actually many jobs shouldn’t need a degree, like you shouldn’t need a college degree to be a banker or an accountant or even a programmer. Though I would argue that you should get a college degree if you are going into a medical field, because the you really should be taught by a professional when it come to handling human lives. By pushing everyone into colleges, the government have to lend out more money, adding more loan to the already deficit budget. Not to mention, those who aren’t very smart also slow the class down, since the teacher have to pace the class accordingly.

Though of course, the point of this piece isn’t to talk about the problem of the education system, nor is it to talk about how to fix our college. This piece is simply my own reflection, my own way of dealing with the excitement now that I’m about to go to Penn State.

I have changed a lot over the course of 2 years. I can’t really say if I had changed for better or worse. I do enjoy the ideas of going to Penn State though.

It should also be noted that I’m a relatively very privilege kid; My parents CAN pay for my college, and had always been willing to pay. I could have go to college if I wanted, I just wanted to get a job and prove myself instead of going to school. I also have a very, very strong motive to go to Penn State, which is my fiance, who work near the school. This probably account for 50-70% of the reason why I go to Penn State, and I only applied to one school.

After I graduated high school, I started off my summer by going to San Francisco to attend a programming bootcamp, having really high expectation. The programming bootcamp I attended prided themselves with “We only accept less than 10% of applications”, which of course, made me feel like “YEAH FINALLY I’M GONNA BE WITH A LOT OF SIMILAR MINDED AWESOME PEOPLE”. My initial excitement soon wore off as I realize a lot of people there didn’t know how to code, and some of the few who do were very arrogant and full of themselves. I remember it very clearly, some guy who was attending UC Irvine had an argument with one of my friend who was still in high school about the difference between a queue and a tree. Not just the guy who was attending Irvine was wrong, he was being so full of himself, saying “I went to college I know, you never had any formal training”. There was a few more things that caused me to snap, but needless to say I realized the San Francisco life wasn’t for me.

While I did get a few jobs offer for a few Start-up in San Francisco, I left. I wanted a job, but I don’t want to work at start-up. After the boot camp ended I went back to Orange County and spend the next 5 months of my life in solitude. My days were pretty much coding and applying for jobs and in constant fear of being a failure. I applied to a few programming jobs around my area, but for the most part they all require a degree and were much more serious than San Francisco. I also wasn’t able to drive, and I can’t just walk to places like I did in SF, so the locations that I can apply to was limited. There were many times when I doubted myself and thought I should had go work at the start up, since something is still better than nothing. I did have plan to move out and go live with my fiance and apply to jobs in his area as well, but something happened and we ended up wasting over $200 in plane ticket. It was my last chance of not going to college, so I accepted defeat, and went to college like my parents wanted.

Life did get better, since now that I’m going to college (just a community college, mind you), my parents are paying for me, I didn’t have to worry about anything. For the first 2 months of attending college, I had so much free time to play video games and enjoy things since no offense, community college education is a breeze. To make sure that I catch up with everyone else, I took 18 credit that spring semester (max is 19 credit, you only need 12 credit to be a full time student). 5 classes were nothing for me, I slept through my C++ class and got an A+ (ya, I finished the class with 106%), disrespected my econ teacher by playing video games during lecture and receive an A while everyone else was having a hard time grasping the concept (the 2 girls who sat next to me had a B and a C). I did have to study for 1 class though, which was calculus 1. But other wise, I got through spring semester and summer semester like it was nothing. At first, I was very cocky, I felt so smart. I was queen of an ant hill, and I really did felt like “urgh this is such a waste of time”. But over time, I eventually toned down since hey, I’m also going to community college like them so I really, really can’t judge them since I’m also on the same boat.

For a few other friends I made when I was in SF however, despite being extremely talented individuals, some of them didn’t have much luck. After 6 months, one of my friend fall apart, lost his jobs, and been unemployed for a long time. His unemployment came as a shock to me, since he was such a talented individual, even more than me. Since he wasn’t able to find a job fast enough, he had to leave SF to go live with his family for a while (which coincidentally was also in PA), and applied to jobs around his area as well. While he did get some offer back from SF, not a single company near where his family live replied back to him, since they all want a minimum of a college degree. Another friends of my did end up having an okay job, he was hired as a product designer, which involve mostly working on the front end and UI. This however, irked me a little bit, since I have a very strong sense of being a “programmer”. Being a “designer” and working only on UI/UX didn’t seem like a real challenge, and even though I’m happy for my friend, I realized without colleges, you lack a lot of opportunity.

As for me though, I did eventually enjoyed college. Yeah sure, there are a lot of people who make me facepalm and wish I was at home coding, as you take higher and more difficult classes, the amount of people like that decline quickly. I understand that you can also meet smart people at work too, but in order to meet you know, programmers that share the same interest as you, you gotta be a programmer first (and not in a startup neither, where you are often time the sole programmer). College education is also different than job education though; in college, you learn a lot more about theory than practical new technology, and this is good. As I have come to realize, it make programming so much better when you actually understand what going behind the scene. And instead of being someone who ask question on StackOverFlow whenever I get stuck, I have became so much better at debugging and know more about algorithm than I would have if I was at work. Remember, EVEN if you shipped 20 different apps, but they all are as mediocre as each other, ultimately you learn nothing new or learn very little. My fiance went to college himself, and he think college deals with a lot of theoreticals which are solvable and have known good solutions, while work deals a lot in planning and trying to pick the best solution from a group of ‘meh” answer. I mean, it is pretty safe to say that someone who studied all the way to Master/Ph.D in Computer Science is more than likely to be very skilled in theoretical CS than programmers who only have a Bachelor. They might lack the work experiences, but they are the guys that come up with faster sort, efficient search engine, better algorithm, etc. I mean, look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they both have graduate experience, and when they were doing their Ph.D together, they founded Google. Sure, they might also be geniuses to be able to come up with those, but you can’t deny that college (again, at least good colleges), does a good job at teaching people theoretical CS, some of which it really hard to just learn on your own or watch videos online. Try apply to big companies like Google, Microsoft, etc without a college degree, they won’t take you; and that’s because they want their employee to know at least some theoretical programming.

Plus, college can also help you with a few things, like connection right on campus without the need to travel to a convention. Tech companies do go to campuses, usually on a setted day like Career Fair to look for prospective students. And even pushing all that aside, college is a really good opportunity for friendship, good opportunity to learn and try new things. Always wanted to try theatre? Join now! Always wanted to practice fencing? Hell yeah! As long as you are on top of your games, feel free to join anything that make your life more enjoyable. It isn’t often that your jobs offer you similar opportunity like you have in college, so take advantage of it.

So yeah. I’m going to college. My opinion of college had changed, and I’m looking forward to it.