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On 31/08/2007, Neil Stone <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'd say the reverse - any reasonable computing degree should expose > > the student to enough to make it quite clear that they can't possibly > > know it all, and connect the student with real world experts who will > > put them in their place sharpish - certainly the case with me. > > ... > > Having said that - most of the important stuff I've learnt has been > > from the open source (particularly perl) community from my placement > > year onwards - I learnt surprisingly little important stuff (other > > than what it's like to work in IT for a year) on my placement year. > > I work in an office for my sins, we have people of various levels of skill > in various departments... A lot of the time we get university graduates > who after the first few months have that "deer in headlights" look about > them.. That's what industrial placements are for :) Any degree without a strong industrial / sandwiche year is incomplete. > I guess they don't teach skills such as "you do not know it all" at uni > these days.. We had old school UNIX types hidden in the CS department at plymuff like Mabs who could quickly put you in your place, and the uni computing society at plymouth has always been a good baptism of fire in server and internet troubleshooting, user support as well as providing links to open source like this LUG and the london perl mongers. > Incidently, when I went to college we were being taught to program in > COBOL.. (yeah, like i'm going to use that...) Yeah - COBOL - it was already "legacy" when it was taught to us at college, we also learnt Pascal (which kinda worked ok for demonstrating simple CS stuff like sorting, hashing, etc that we were learning in the programming theory part of the course). There was also an optional course in the "new and modern C programming language", which is odd as K&R was published at least a decade before I went to college. I can't believe that they didn't teach a single algorithm on my course at uni, possibly they expected us to teach ourselves algorithms, but there wasn't even a 'start/look here' or mention of them on our course. Luckily the college course covered the absolute basics (not functional and other clever stuff, just basic file access, sorting, searching, etc). A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html