NYCPHP Meetup

[Ben Sgro]

Good call,

I love to read. Read all the time. Just read your email and I'm going to 
read a book.

- Ben

Christopher R. Merlo wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 5:02 PM, David Krings <ramons at gmx.net 
> <mailto:ramons at gmx.net>> wrote:
>
>     A university is supposed to train interested candidates in a field
>     of choice with the goal to make them subject matter experts in
>     that field.
>
>
> That's actually not true, and your apparent belief in this untruth is 
> probably what has led to your seemingly very strongly felt distaste 
> for university education.
>
> The purpose of a college or university is to provide the student with 
> an education, so that the student may go on to contribute back to 
> society.  An education involves more than just learning a trade, or a 
> skill.  Moreover, most experts in any field are usually well-versed in 
> some other field as well; this is what allows educated people to do 
> things like draw analogies, or relate to non-technical people.  
> Physicists must read the classics in English literature so that 
> non-physicists will talk to them at dinner parties; this helps with 
> things like professional networking.  (Everyone who got your job 
> because you know the right non-IT person, raise your hands.  David, 
> look at all those hands!)  No one expects a physicist to be able to 
> prattle on about Huck Finn like a lit professor; but the physicist 
> shouldn't just stare open-mouthed, either.  "Yes, Mark Twain was an 
> important figure in American Literature" will go a long, long way in 
> making friends and influencing people.  And an English major should 
> take a lab science course for the exact same reason; in case he finds 
> himself at a dinner party populated mostly by physicists, knowing at 
> least that there's an inverse relationship between distance and 
> gravitational pull, even if the English major doesn't remember or 
> understand that it's an exponential relationship, can keep him in the 
> conversation long enough to not be embarrassed.
>
> When my programming students complain (and they always do) about how 
> much of their grade is based on writing, I tell them two things.  
> First, when I worked in industry as a programmer, the pointy-haired 
> bosses kept coming to me for explanations, and eventually asked me to 
> join large inter-department teams to work on big special projects with 
> all the suits, and eventually would have asked me to lead those kinds 
> of special projects had I stayed with that company any longer; and the 
> reason they kept tapping me, over my colleagues, was that I was an 
> effective communicator, and I was able to translate plans to code, and 
> feature requests to timetables, but also code to English, and bug 
> hunts to revised timetables; and I didn't scare the suits away when I 
> talked to them.  And I owe that to my liberal-arts undergrad 
> experience, taking a BA in CS, with a creative writing course and a 
> public speaking course and all the trimmings.  I even made use of 
> something I learned in a phys ed course, when I was tutoring a 
> seventh-grader in math last school year.  He really wanted to shoot 
> baskets more than do math problems, and so I gave him five minutes if 
> he got a few questions right.  Of course he got those questions right, 
> and off we went to shoot baskets.  But he had a great deal of trouble 
> passing me the basketball, and I taught him the bounce pass, the way I 
> learned it as a college junior.  His mom kept hiring me back to tutor 
> him, because he really liked me after that (and the grades slowly went 
> up).
>
> The other thing I tell my students is that out there in the real 
> world, where all you guys are, people judge other people's 
> intelligence, fairly or not, according to how effectively they 
> communicate, and that the only two things that make you a better 
> writer are 1) writing a lot, and 2) reading a lot.
>
> So, anyway, I felt compelled to write, because I'm afraid that people 
> trying to choose whether to get a college education or not might be 
> misled into thinking it's something it's not.  The service we provide 
> is not something you can get anywhere else, and for lots of people, 
> it's the difference between promotions or not.
> $0.02,
> -c
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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