I Finally Graduated: Reflections on the Journey

Last month, I finally got my Master’s, after a long 5 years of school.

It has taken me some time to process my graduation, what it meant, the things I’ve learned during my time at school, whether it was worth it, what’s next… A lot of questions went through my mind trying to assess this chapter.

This is a personal and a retrospective piece, apologies if it reads a bit messy to you, I tried to put some structure to it.

P.S: I use the words school and university interchangeably.

Context

I studied at ESI SBA, one of the hardest Algerian computer science schools to get into because of the high Baccalaureat score you need to have.

I avoided describing it as the “best” CS school because it opens a door into a discussion I am not willing to have in this article.

As a consequence to the high entry bar, a sense of elitism is nurtured in the students against ones from other CS schools. This is also noticeable in the behavior of teachers, having a much higher expectation level, asking for more work…

I am not sure how much of what I’ll share in this article is specific to ESI SBA, how much of it is related to CS studies, and how much of it holds true to academia as a whole, but I am sure there’s an overlap.

The things I learned

After writing my draft of this section, I realized that each sub-section could be expanded upon in a separate article. There are many points I haven’t mentioned too because it got too lengthy for my liking, so I am instead sharing a summary of some of them.

Patience

Having moved to a new city, I had to live in the dorms, and they’re absolutely horrible.

The room you get could be lacking all sorts of things; windows, chairs, tables, beds, and even doors for some unlucky folks. So you’d have to go scavanging for some items from abandoned rooms and abandoned blocks. This was super fun in the beginning, you feel like you were spawned in a Minecraft game, but it soon develops into frustration.

I am going to skip mentioning the other living conditions because it will get lengthy, but suffice to say, it was an experience.

Moving into dorms drastically changes your lifestyle, to the worse. Knowing this, being away from the family, and looking at the remaining years ahead of you at school, is really tough. Realizing all of this and adapting to the situation, truly thickens your skin, and we need a lot of thick skin to go through life.

You grow as a person when you increase your tolerance to highly undesirable things, and life is full of that.

Learning about learning, and learning about one’s self

I’ve always recognized that I am a bit slower at understanding things, especially when first hearing about them, but this was more accentuated when I joined the school, I was among the top students of the country, the “elitists”, if we take the Baccalaureat score as a metric.

I could count with my fingers the times that I understood something during class, I almost always had to try at it again when I get back to the dorms. This contrasted with the majority of students, who admirably got things at a much higher speed than I did.

Having gone through this cycle many times, I understood well that the way I was comparing myself with others was fruitless, it stems from the assumption that all of us are either equivalent in cognition, or that I am better. But it doesn’t improve your situation, doesn’t get you anywhere. That alone, is reason to let it go.

If there’s any use to this comparison, it’s to use others as a compass to position yourself on some spectrum, but even that is, I don’t know, pointless?

Like everything else, doing something repeatedly, and deliberately, you get better at it, and this instance, I got better at learning. I understood how I usually learn things, and kept trying to enhance the process, and I am still trying to this day!

However after a couple of semesters, perhaps unfortunately, I started optimizing for grades and passing the year, over actual learning.

Titles are just hints

This is related to the previous section. After repeatedly getting excited by course titles, only to be hugely disappointed, I became more critical of materials.

This applies universally, a description of a thing, is just a people’s approximation. For example, job titles are not what the job is about, the job’s responsibilities is what accurately describes it.

Similary, a class’s title is not what it is about. We had a class for example entitled Introduction to Software Engineering, you’d think it would be about design patterns, or at least how to design software in general. But it ended up being a class about project management and diagrams (UML, sequence diagram…)

Look into the content of the thing/person, take titles with a grain of salt.

Knowing people is invaluable

I can’t say I am an introvert or an extrovert, I am selectively one or the other depending on the situation. Ironically enough, I never thought I’d “need” to know people until I joined school.

Only then had I truly recognized the insane resource people are! There’s a lot of information you’d never hear of unless someone shares it with you (some people call this gossip :3).

For example, during my process of “optimizing for school”, I had to recognize the pattern each teacher uses in their exams, and in addition to using the past exams, I asked more senior students.

However, you should always strive to be useful to others as well, you can’t expect to keep taking without giving back, and some more. Otherwise you’re not really developing relationships and connections, you’re just using people.

Being known as “the front end” guy, my school’s network connected me with many clients, some of whom I am still working with!

Relationships are important, maintaining them in a healthy way is expensive, but it’s so very much worth it.

Academia is not optimized for learning

We had +8 classes per semester, if you’re goal is truly to learn, there’s no way you can deal with that much volume at once, and I am not sure how it became the “standard” in Algeria.

I admit that the usual kind of people who complain about this are students who want to just get by easily, but it doesn’t change the fact that learning requires a lot of time and focus, and you lose both when you increase the volume.

In addition to that, the school has a certain reputation to keep, you know, since they’re the elites’ school. That manifests in adding materials to the curriculum “to keep up with the modrn times”.

For example we had a Big Data class in our final year where we “studied” Kafka, Hadoop, Spark and Apache Airflow, all at the same time, all without understanding their use cases and the problems they try to solve. This does much more harm than had we not even heard of the terms, because at least then, when asked, we’d simply say we don’t know these tools, as opposed to developing the impression of being familiar with these tools, because we had them at school.

Schools do follow trends -and I hope in good faith- but man do they do it in such a bad way.

Was it worth it?

In retrospect, you can claim you should’ve or shouldn’t have done this and that, but that’s only apparent to you now that you have the information and experiences, which you clearly lacked at that time of your life.

You can only make decisions given the information, resources and conditions you have at a time. And at that time, I think I made a decent decision by joining the school and seeing it to the end.

Besides, is there really anything we could do other than learn and move on?