He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.”
So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the term I got a failing mark. I went to Tewksbury, and he had no recollection of having told me that I shouldn’t come to class. I tried explaining myself about the simulator, and showed him. He grudgingly agreed to change my mark, seeming suspicious.
Despite my attempts to work with the dept, the simulator never got used.
My "filesystems and database design" class was basically howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in actual file system and database design
Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic bullshit and skip into the real world.
The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).
In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.
IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.
I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.
My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.
"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"
Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.
My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.
- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics
Completing university is the most useless project I've worked on.
My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all weekend and told me to "ensure not work over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.
So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend, confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to "only log 40hrs this week".
He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt like that again there would be consequences"
So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent the email again.
It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing something.
Another kind of sad Tewks story is, once I went to see him in his office, and I witnessed him giving a grad student and early edition copy of a Claude Shanon tome. Clearly was intended as a nice gift. The grad student didn’t get it, and Tewks had to explain who Shanon was to a EE PhD candidate. I wanted to jump up and down and get his attention but I was just that pesky undergraduate with some scheme to get a free A…
Anyways he was a Bell Labs guy and full of lore and wisdom, but I would have loved to have known him as a younger man. Same with Harold Stalwen.
I did have the great honor of taking courses with Roger Pinkham and Norman J Morgenstein Horing who despite both being in their 80s were possessed of incredible intellect and didactic powers. Pinkham in particular was the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Gandalf.
