No. I don’t have a degree…
Everyone is judging me. Am I really doing this wrong?
I dropped out of college for the first time when I was nineteen. I’d like to say that I really did give it the ol’ college try, but I didn’t. The honest to god truth is that I had no idea what I was doing. Nobody told me when I was in high school how to handle the transition from being a child to being an adult. No one told me I was supposed to apply for college in the fall of my Senior year. No one told me how to actually fill out a FAFSA. I didn’t know what a FAFSA was.
I walked my application into the enrollment office at a state university at the last possible second, because I accidentally saw there was a deadline somewhere. I enrolled in two classes that fall, because I had $900 in my bank account and that’s what I could afford. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and neither did the ‘advisor’ — the grad student who worked in the enrollment services building part time because the cost of college is too. damn. high. One of those classes was ‘College Writing.’ I don’t remember what the other was called. I just called it Thursday night at the movies, since all we ever did was watch black and whites on a giant screen every week. Some of them were pretty good.
Life Experience
isn’t really worth all that much to an employer.
Listen. Where I’m from, you have three options: go to college, live in the same neighborhood forever, or join the military. The Army offered me fifty thousand dollars (for college) to sign up, and they’d send me to California to learn another language. That sounded rad, so I did it. I spent nigh two years in a classroom ‘learning’ Arabic so that I could be stationed in southern Arizona where I never heard a syllable of that beautiful language uttered.
So after that ‘experience’, I went back home and I got a job doing phone tech support because I was ‘good with computers.’ You know that’s still a thing people say, like there is some sort of option in the 21st century to be bad with computers? Tech support is a soul-sucking job, and it’s a thousand times worse if you have to do it in a call center. The next time you get that ‘foreign’ voice on the other line when you call about a problem with your printer? Be glad that person lives an ocean away from you and isn’t sitting next to you on the bus.
I also went back to college, again. I even made the President’s/Dean’s/Fan Club’s list, which is just a fancy way of saying I turned in all of my homework and wrote halfway intelligent papers. Then I dropped out. Again.
It wouldn’t be the last time. More on that in a moment.
People who went to college and got a degree and then got a job and then another job won’t really understand this, but there’s nothing quite as demoralizing as getting yet another crappy job just because you need to be employed to not starve. (This happens to college graduates, too, by the way, but I imagine that it’s different because they already get to be ‘building a career’ rather than ‘getting by however you can.’)
So, put on my resume that I am technically savvy, customer oriented sales professional. Because the only jobs I could find were tech support, sales, and customer service. The thing is, what I really wanted to be was …
An evil genius!
That reads: ‘software developer.’
The problem is that I knew what software developers did (I thought) and ‘computer things’ is what everyone in my life, ever, expected me to do, so I very obviously wanted nothing to do with it.
My first experience with programming involved many, many hours of tinkering in QBasic in the early 90s, building awful screen savers and terribly broken GOTO statements. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved it, and even though the documentation made no sense to me — to be fair, I’ve gone back and looked at it since. It still makes no sense — there was a sense of wonder there.
But then, I went to high school, where they actually taught a class in QBasic, sort of. And a class in FORTRAN, and Pascal.
This was 1999, people. I didn’t know there were such things as C++ or Java or Python or Perl or any of the dozens of languages I could have been exposed to. And the instructor was in his 70s, and knew less about the material than I did.
So I didn’t do software, because it seemed, well… old.
And the one time I got to meet actual software developers, they were actually mechanical engineers building such exciting things as hard drive caddies for rack servers. Not very sexy to a seventeen year old.
I’m smart.
and I’m not just saying that.
I got a 35 on my ACT after staying up all night playing Civilization. (Sorry, Mom). That’s not meant to toot my own horn, it’s just a point of reference. I have always been naturally gifted at problem solving, reading comprehension, numbers and memorizing things I have no business remembering. That wasn’t working hard, it just happened, and I’m very lucky.
But that isn’t enough, and it never earned me a special understanding of how the world works and how college works and how to enroll in the right classes or choose a career path or be an adult or anything like that at all. I was a child until I was in my late twenties, and today at thirty-three, I still am not quite sure that I’ve grown out of it.
But here’s the point:
No, really.
College didn’t work for me. At this point, I’m certain that my ‘academic record’ is sufficiently tarnished that it likely never will. But, I remember the day I realized that maybe, just maybe, a degree really was just a piece of paper.
One of my more foolish ventures involved my MBA friend and I deciding that we could build our own APP. We thought, because we were smart people, that we could just magick one out of thin air or that people would just swarm to us because we had a cool idea and build it for us. Hint: they won’t. If you want to build something cool, you better be willing to get your hands dirty and do a lot of work yourself.
In the midst of this process, we had the opportunity to partner with an innovative program at the state university I mentioned earlier. They would find us a group of enterprising Computer Science (and Video Game) developers in their program to build something for us, and we provided, well, a project for them to build.
It seemed intriguing.
After the first meeting (and my first experience with real, live Comp. Sci majors), I realized that I knew more about programming than they did, and several of these students were getting ready to graduate. My only experience had come from bootstrapping myself on the internet and Udacity.com.
This is the future of education
and it’s moving very quickly.
I don’t have a college degree. I don’t have a formal computer science education. I am a hacker, and I’m proud of it. In early 2012, following the massive success of an online Artificial Intelligence course, Sebastian Thrun, formerly of Google X and a tenured Stanford professor, abandoned it all to pursue a dream to make education, specifically computer science education, accessible to the world.
In two months, I built a tiny version of the same web-crawling, page indexing, system that Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to launch Google. Within two more, I had built a JavaScript interpreter and a functional, database driven web app using Google App Engine.
Today, I have graduated Udacity’s Full Stack Web Development Nanodegree program and I contract with Udacity to provide code and project reviews for their currently enrolled students in several programs. I have a portfolio of projects that I have built myself in Python and JavaScript, and am actively pursuing development positions in the industry. I’ve built apps in Flask and endpoint APIs using Google App Engine and Datastore. I’ve taught new fledgling developers how to document their code and how to avoid redundancies in their databases.
I’m ready to become a fully employed, actively contributing member of the development community.
But, no. I don’t have a college degree.
