I have to say I agree with the reasons you gave here though. University (or college for that matter) is a great way to broaden your horizon in many different ways AND to find out more about oneself too. Who you are and what you stand for are things usually learned in uni as well as that’s the time when you (have to) stand on your own two feet for the first time.

My experiences in college and university were great and I look back on an awesome education not just the materials learned for my profession but also the things I learned apart from that.

It was a generalisation, and I have admitted to this more than once, but anyone with half a brain would have realised this. How can one person know every grad student in the world?

My opinion of grad students has worsened from this experience although it has very little to do with whether they think they’re smarter than anyone but more to do with how they deal with unimportant, trivial issues. Even though the way you’re acting has very little to do with your being a grad student.

I know I’m an advocate for not using the phrase ‘It’s only the internet!’ but I think it’s applicable in this situation.

OMGZ! SOMEONE MADE A GENERALISATION WHICH INCLUDES ME ON THE INTERNETZ! MUST WRITE PATRONISING BLOG ENTRY AND HARP ON ABOUT IT EVERY CHANCE I GET!
^ That’s how I’m viewing your behaviour.

Did you ever stop to think about commenting or sending me an e-mail letting me know that you’re offended by my generalisation and ask me to clear things up before going off and making assumptions? Even though you ended up becoming part of my generalisation anyway, I would have realised my mistake and made changes.

Anywho, this is pathetic. You’re pathetic for caring so much when we’re never going to actually co-exist with each other, I’m pathetic for replying when I know you’re just going to continue to challenge every last damn thing I have to say. So I’m going to stop being pathetic as soon as I hit ‘Submit’ and I hope you’ve already stopped being pathetic.

Sorry about this, Amanda. You have full permission to give me an earful (or eyeful… it’s the internetz!), because I deserve it.

1) If I were a math, physics or comp sci grad, I could toss my degree in the air and realistically expect manna from heaven to come crashing down upon me, sweeping me up in a wave of ecstasy. I just mentioned this in a reply to the comments I got – my university isn’t known for any particular “strength” in poli sci, which is particularly sad since field reputation (as opposed to general reputation) is becoming increasingly important these days. I’ve heard people who’ve sat on poli sci hiring committees at American schools say that if they needed someone with a strength in one particular field that, say, Washington University (St. Louis) is awesome at, they’d be more likely to look at a WashU PhD than a Berkeley PhD, even though Berkeley is obviously widely known as the “much better” school. So yeah, we’ve got our Nobel Prize laureates and politicians and such, but that’s gotten me next to zip in terms of “prestige recognition”; if I’d been a physics student, I’d obviously be whistling a different tune. I was fortunate enough to have a handful of awesome professors, but I also saw the dark and creepy underbelly of the whole system, so it hasn’t all been puppies and cupcakes and rainbows. To my knowledge, no one with a poli sci/int’l pols degree from my department has ever been successfully employed abroad, which naturally means that I have ZERO networking opps to work with and I’m pioneering uncharted territory here.

2) I’ve learned a LOT of what I’m applying/will be applying in my career at uni. Sure, I’ve had to tweak the system to make it work to my advantage, but that doesn’t mean I’m not largely riding on the knowledge/experience I received while there.

3) The viewpoints of any person attending a specific school on that specific school and the education they’re receiving there would surely be valid. However (!!!), making an unfair and largely ignorant generalization of grad students/uni experiences the world over certainly isn’t. That was my beef with the entire statement – had it said that Nellie wasn’t fond of particular grad students at her particular school, since it seems to her that all her particular school does is X and Y, so the grad students there must only possess X and Y as skills/knowledge sets, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, I sure as hell wasn’t fond of quite a few aspects of my uni, a select group of grad students included.

As I said in my most recent entry, I haven’t been at university long enough to get anything other than a little further extension on what I already knew. It’s probable I will find something outside of simply learning the course content as I progress, but for now, that’s all I’m getting from my experience.

And unfortunately, both my aunty (who got her Masters degree from The University of Waikato) and Sam (who is doing Honours this year) can’t seem to tell me if I will get any more than that because they didn’t. *sad face*

I’m hoping I do get more from it though. After hearing about what others have gained from university aside from their degree, it’s given me a little bit of hope that I will learn something outside of the classroom/lecture theatre. (But the people here aren’t exactly friendly, you witnessed that! :P)

Cultural horizons I’m inclined to agree with, although university has taught me more about the UK than it has the world. We have a handful of Chinese students who barely speak a word of English and are either a) asses who laugh whilst others are trying to give presentations of their work or b) too timid to even partake in conversation.

Obtaining work skills is a hazy area. I’ve worked in the industry and university gave me a leg up in terms of time management and team building. These skills translate well into a working environment, but I think my university doesn’t teach them at an appropriate level. At university they say do a project with a partner to hand in three weeks from now. At work ten of us would have a meeting to discuss a design from which I’d have to come up with three possible variations within a two hour time frame.

On a somewhat irrelevant note – I like Castells even though some of his work is a little dated. His heart was in the right place when he wrote Internet Galaxy.

And everyone knows the true purpose of university is to need a liver replacement before graduation ;)

Fact is, for computer science majors, you can read treaties and essays all you want, but unless you actually sit down and write the code, it doesn’t mean anything.

So, I’m happy that my university gave me all the foundations to write basic Object Oriented Applications, so that I could easily fit in a my workplace, by just skimming through the theoretical part of the various documentation.

I didn’t much care for socialization, but then again, my job is not that of acquiring business partners (I develop software, and not take care of the company’s business relations).

I think one shouldn’t underestimate the place of “additional material” that one picks up from one’s degree, especially if one’s degree is relatively specific (like finance or education). Sure you might not need to remember the names of theorists you’ve read for day-to-day work, but many of the general principles that you pick up at Uni probably seep into how you regard your job and stuff. For example, with law, I wouldn’t ever need to apply the historical legal development for whatever area of law, but it’s important when I am confronted with a real life problem to understand the context of what that law is to know the best way to engage with it. In the same way, for example, with accounting, you might not need to apply everything you learn in your degree but the… vibe of what you learnt would give you an edge to the whole field than someone who didn’t have such a background.

I agree with you that the three generic skills you listed are important (as well as just being a likeable person) for any work place these days, but the education you get from your degree shouldn’t necessarily be devalued as merely additional.

Reply: Again using my own university as an example, I find that the amount of buildings/allocated resources to the Arts and other faculties I’ve mentioned is much larger than that of medicine, law, science, etc. etc. From that, I can only conclude that the faculties and the people within them far outnumber those of the scientific fields. And this is from a university renowned nationally for its medical and scientific research!

While not dismissing the additional material out of hand, I do think that a lot of it is simple common sense, or common knowledge to those who read broadly for even just half an hour a day. To take your example of education as a relatively specific field where one would need to recall the general principles…well, after two years of studying education, the majority of the lectures, seminars, tutorials, I attended were based around the simple concepts of: a) everyone has different learning methods; b) people learn differently at different ages; c) there can be cultural barriers to effective teaching. All three concepts are fairly common-sense type knowledge, correct?

So well…essentially while I agree that such ‘book learning’ shouldn’t be dismissed per se, the core principles of many ‘basic’ degrees, that you can actually use in future life are, largely speaking, painfully obvious to anyone who can think logically.