Whipped Cream Difficulties

  He went home three years later. He explained no more than to say, “I lived with the Crows for a while. It was sometime before I could leave. They called me Horse.”
He did not find it necessary either to apologize or to boast, because he was the equal of any man on earth.
—”A Man Called Horse”, Dorothy M. Johnson

  Instapundit and other folks have written eloquently about the “higher education bubble”. Other people I know and respect, like TJIC, have commented on ridiculous majors and the ridiculous people who pursue them.

So why did I go back to school? Why did I spend six years and <mumble mumble> dollars pursuing a degree? And why St. Ed’s? I’m not Catholic.

  That last question is pretty easy to answer: they were the first to approach me with a degree plan that I could make work with my schedule. (Of course, at the time, I expected to be working in the same place and to be reimbursed 100% for my educational expenses. It is interesting how I suddenly became expendable when I announced I was going back to school for a degree. But that’s another story for another time.)

As for the other questions, in no particular order:

• Familial disappointment. I kind of felt like the black sheep of the family as the only one without a college degree. Now that’s over with. (I’m still thinking about pursuing advanced degrees, if only so I can give my mother a setup for the old joke, “My son’s a doctor, but not the kind that helps people. Unlike his sister…”) Not that I want to make my family feel bad; they shouldn’t, and today is not the day that we settle all family business. But things are what they are, you know?
• Peer pressure. For a long time, I’ve been the only person in my circle of friends without at least one college degree. Some of them have more than one; there are at least two PhDs and one Masters that I can think of right off the top of my head. I’ve felt like the dumb one in the group. More to the point, I’ve felt sometimes that I’m being treated like the dumb one in the group. I’m starting to come to the realization that some of that is just the way certain people are, and there’s nothing I can do to change them. But at least now I have some level of “street cred”, if you will.
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T. When I made the decision to do this, I was still at my previous job at the Other Place. Under the previous management, we had a fair number of “disagreements” with our outside consultants. You win some, you lose some, but there were times when I felt like they didn’t respect my opinions because I was self-taught, didn’t have a degree, and my sympathies tended to be more with the “poor bloody infantry” than the programmers. I’ll also admit that in retrospect there were times that I was wrong, but we’ll come to that later on.
  Things got worse after the new management came in, and brought with them their own “outside consultant”. I vividly remember the argument that probably precipitated my firing. The “outside consultant” who had supposedly been brought in and given free reign by the committee who ran the organization, claimed that we could throw away our entire front end user interface and just key everything into SQL Server through an Excel spreadsheet. When I pointed out that there was a tremendous amount of business logic built into the front end to handle specific business cases, his response was “All we have to do it put it into a domain.” That was his response to every objection: “All we have to do is put it into a domain.” And without a degree, I didn’t have the credibility to make it stick when I told him that I would fight him every step of the way, even to the level of the governing board.
• To prove to myself I could do it. I have this bad habit of doing things mostly just to prove to myself I can do them: shooting USPSA, dive certification, etc.
• “Career Opportunities”. Last time I was looking for a job, I got the very distinct impression that experience was nice, but folks really wanted that piece of paper saying you’d gone through a course of education. Some of that may be that a degree proves you can follow instructions and stick it out for a long haul. (One of my early mentors in programming and system administration had a degree in anthropology. He told me at that time that employers weren’t necessarily looking for people who had CS degrees; they were looking for people they could train, and a degree – any degree – was a sign of that. In some ways, it is kind of like coaches who say, “I can teach skills. I can’t teach character.”) Some of that may also be that a degree proves you can tolerate a certain amount of bulls–t, which I have learned is a valuable skill to possess in the corporate world.
• This one is a little hard to explain. I trust that at least some of my readers have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; if you haven’t, that’s okay, as I don’t think you need to have read it to follow what I’m saying here.
  There’s a section of the book where Pirsig talks about the “degreeless, gradeless university” and uses as his motivating example a student who drops out of his hypothetical university and gets a job in a motorcycle shop:

  His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He’d think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn’t have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he’d now found a brand of theoretical information which he’d have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.
  So he would come back to our degreeless and grade-less school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.

  That’s pretty much the story of my life. Except it wasn’t designing motorcycle engines, it was computer science. How do you build a better compiler when you don’t understand how compilers work? How do you estimate the efficiency of a program when you don’t understand complexity? How do you design a content management system that doesn’t do things like randomly remove HTML tags the user inserted? (Edited to add: Yes, like friggin’ WordPress did with this post.)
  Some of these things were easy to pick up; it isn’t that hard to figure out O(n) vs. O(n^2). But some of these things, like graph theory and persuasive speaking and (fill in some blanks here) were things that I felt like I needed someone to help me and guide me through the brush, and I was willing to pay for the guide.
  As good as St. Ed’s is (and it is a very fine school), I do think there were a few times when I shook some people up by asking…let’s say “pointed” questions. (For the money Large Computer Corporation and I were paying, damn right you’d better be coming up with answers.) I realize this is a long way around to talk about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, but this is my blog, and I’ll do it my way.

So. Did it work?
Yes. And no. And maybe.

A degree in Computer Systems Management is more of a sysadmin degree than a CompSci degree. What that implies is that we spent less time learning about ACID and database theory and more time learning about the specifics of Microsoft SQLServer. “Discrete Mathematics” was probably the closest I ever got to computational theory (well, and maybe the first of the two Java courses I took).
On the other hand, I feel that now I have a better base to work from. It isn’t that I have all the tools, but now I think I have the tools to build the tools. I feel better about my ability to pick up things I need from places like MIT and Stanford. A lot of things have changed since 2006, including the world of distance and online learning. And I get the strong feeling that we’re going to see even more rapid changes to our model of education in the next two years.
Job prospects? Well, we’ll see about that. Large Computer Corporation seems to place a higher value on certifications than degrees. Then again, LCC is not the only fish out there.
Family and peers? I’ll burn those bridges when I come to them. My mother certainly seems happy.

Oddly enough, I can’t say there was a time I ever wondered why I was “here” (in the “why am I taking this class?” sense). Even “Race, Class, and Gender” was kind of fun (especially when I turned in my paper on the “Racist Roots of Gun Control”). I’m not sure I would say “Critical Thinking” and “Ethical Analysis” were fun, but I feel like I got some benefit from them that I would never have been able to get by myself.
I had to get my ticket punched for two semesters of English, even though I had transfer credit from The Mindless Octopus Up I-35 From St. Ed’s. (You all know the one I’m talking about, right? The university that the football team can be proud of?) The first class I took was “Literature and Film”, where we got to watch movies, read the original source material, and discuss both.
That was where I picked up probably my single favorite textbook: Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films. There is a lot of great stuff in that book, which I commend to your attention. “Your Arkansas Traveler”, which I’d never read. “A Reputation”, Richard Edward Connell‘s other short story. The original short story version of “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”. Faulkner’s “Tomorrow” (which has a strong movie adaptation that will have you muttering “I call it a sling blade” under your breath.) The nearly forgotten Hagar Wilde’s story “Bringing Up Baby”. And so on.
There was a lot of stuff we had to do for that class that I didn’t much care for. (Elaine was right about “The English Patient”. And I couldn’t stand “Field Of Dreams”, which should come as no great shock, but I wouldn’t wish Kinsella’s fate on my worst enemy.)
The thing is, even though I didn’t like a lot of the stuff I did, I grew as a result of doing it. And I liked enough of it, and was good enough at all of it (even the stuff I didn’t like) to keep doing it. I know I’ve dwelled on that one class a lot, but it was a seminal experience for me; the first time I really felt engaged with something other than a CompSci course.

There’s another great quote from Zen: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.” Perhaps that is the real value of a good education; to help you work on the cycle called yourself.

(At some point, I should tell the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance story. Perhaps later this week.)

I was listening to this song a lot when I first started this journey six years ago. Now that I’m almost done, it still resonates with me. People who know me well are aware that I have a soft spot for female vocals, but I think there’s more to it than that.

“I wrap my fear around me like a blanket, I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it…” Apparently, it is not true that the Vikings habitually burned their ships during invasions to prevent retreats. Too bad, because it makes for a great story. Especially if you’re one of those people who writes about management.
I never saw anybody with a poster of Rasputin (but you know, I’d kind of like to have one myself), and I saw some impressive beards, but never one down to the knee level.
“I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free.” A’yah, as they say in Maine.
I didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out in bars at 3 AM (2 AM is closing time here in Austin) but I understand the desire to seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend.

We go to the bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival and we stand up for the lookout
There’s more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine

Yeah. I feel pretty close to fine right now. And I’m not going to apologize for saying this, and I’m not going to boast beyond this: but right now, as far as I am concerned, I am the equal of any man on earth.

Edited to add: Two timely things that surfaced since I started this draft: today’s XKCD (I’m a sucker for Gilbert and Sullivan, and G&S parodies), and this post by Calvin’s Mom. She’s right: “Some people just aren’t meant for college.” And some people just aren’t ready for it at the time we’ve set in society. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” (I think Calvin’s Mom has observed elsewhere on her blog that she actually prefers to deal with adult learners, because they want to be there. I know I’ve heard the same thing from my professors.)

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