I don't miss the intense status-anxiety, especially among post-grads, where there were some seriously bitchy jealousy dynamics ("he's lecturing?!? But he's only got a master's..." or "first year students are always so lazy" etc).
And plenty of personalities who took refuge in academia because they lacked the empathy or EQ to get jobs in industry, to be honest.
However, I found it a joy to sit in lectures with real live professional computer scientists who I admired, to have morning tea in the lecturer's lounge (yeah they were cool and loved having bushy-tailed students wanting to pick their brains over things at break time, believe it or not). To browse the literature in the library (I actually read Turing's papers, or tried to).
We had a lecturer by the name of Prof. Tad Takaoka, who would challenge us with things like optimizing heapsort by 15%, or Dijkstra's, and we would lose perspective and go on this nutty chase. I remember doing an all-nighter then charging upstairs to his office at 9AM - TAD IS THIS IT? No, you missed this case.. heady stuff man, good buzz.
There was diversity too, way more than in industry.
It was super expensive and took part-time jobs to stay afloat and minimize debt (it was all on me), but it was a force-feeding of some heavy concepts I couldn't have taught myself. I'd do it again (maybe not at this age though haha).
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I loved university.
I don't miss the intense status-anxiety, especially among post-grads, where there were some seriously bitchy jealousy dynamics ("he's lecturing?!? But he's only got a master's..." or "first year students are always so lazy" etc).
And plenty of personalities who took refuge in academia because they lacked the empathy or EQ to get jobs in industry, to be honest.
However, I found it a joy to sit in lectures with real live professional computer scientists who I admired, to have morning tea in the lecturer's lounge (yeah they were cool and loved having bushy-tailed students wanting to pick their brains over things at break time, believe it or not). To browse the literature in the library (I actually read Turing's papers, or tried to).
We had a lecturer by the name of Prof. Tad Takaoka, who would challenge us with things like optimizing heapsort by 15%, or Dijkstra's, and we would lose perspective and go on this nutty chase. I remember doing an all-nighter then charging upstairs to his office at 9AM - TAD IS THIS IT? No, you missed this case.. heady stuff man, good buzz.
There was diversity too, way more than in industry.
It was super expensive and took part-time jobs to stay afloat and minimize debt (it was all on me), but it was a force-feeding of some heavy concepts I couldn't have taught myself. I'd do it again (maybe not at this age though haha).