What the college has taught me? (other than computer science)
Just graduated. The college has taught me a lot about computer science, and what else? In this post, I want to discuss some of the stuff that I learned during (but not necessarily from) the college.
1. Avoiding being too opinionated. Especially in the topics that I'm not very informed about. I think it's important to have the ability to realize that sometimes we're holding on to an argument just because we believed in it for a long time or just because it sounds right. I'm sure that every day countless debates are happening around the world just to end up nowhere and result in nothing but two annoyed people. I have learned that any debate is an opportunity to challenge my previous ideas and possibly learn more about their opposite sides. I owe this to various social courses in the curriculum and to my friends who like to engage in a hot discussion at any time of the day.
2. Fighting with procrastination. Almost every student suffers from it and only a few bother to fight with it. With procrastination, the deadlines become nightmares, especially when a couple of them are overlapping. Well, I'm not sure if I should be grateful to my college to give us such strict and frequent deadlines, but, less than two years, I was able to have the works done 2-3 days before their deadlines. Because otherwise, when I put them off, there was no time being left for any other thing at all. Therefore I decided that had to find my way out with fighting with all the procrastination habits I have and work ahead of the deadline schedule.
3. Not relying on the plans too much. So I was the guy who plans the restaurant for tomorrow's dinner and the gas station to stop before that. I wasn't aware of the fact that it was time for God to laugh when I started college.
Man plans, and God laughs.
Although I was happy with living a planned life, I noticed that it's not the case when plans start to fall through rapidly. Then, I tried to stop making any assumptions and embraced the mentality in which I should be surprised when all things go smoothly and well. Well, I'm still working on it but I believe I definitely come a long way as I stopped making plans full of assumptions.
4. Surviving with 5 hours of sleep. There's this infamous holy triangle of the college. With good time management, there are some (small) periods where you can have all three, but most of the time I have experienced that the pick-two rule holds. One thing I knew was that I would be picking 'good grades' in any case. Therefore I switched between the other two from time to time.
Arise, we have eternity for sleeping!
During my last year, I pushed myself to have the 'social life & good grades' pair almost all the time. Considering the virus outbreak in the second semester, I'm happy (and feeling lucky) with that decision. And you see, it also made me learn my limits.
There's obviously a lot more the college has taught me, some of which being more important than the ones I listed here. It's the case that these were the ones that came to my mind after pondering for some minutes.