arch, I don’t know…
I have one of those ‘I should quit school’ days.. And just today I saw a post on planet fedora from Mel Chua .
She is not alone one of the most awesome geek girls I know, but she also helped me out a couple of times already. (big thank you Mel!)
The title of her blogpost was ‘How to do stuff?‘. While I was reading the post I saw some very familiar things.. I C/P’ed some of her text (I hope she doesn’t mind):
In My Parents’ World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Get A Job according to these Complex Procedures”)
- Be interested in something
- Study (very, very, very) hard
- Get (very, very, very) good grades
- Make a resume
- Buy suit
- Apply to jobs
- Get introduced to recruiter
- Get interviewed
- Get hired
- Do Stuff
Except that the “Do Stuff” might be… well, entry-level job, filing stuff, doing thankless gruntwork waiting ’till you could move up the ladder and really Do Stuff, you know…
In The FOSS World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Do Stuff”)
- Be interested in something
- Do Stuff
- get hired
As she is already working,she must be one of people that know what they are talking about. right? So I told her on IRC I was thinking about quiting school, and start searching a job in open source.. But then she said something interesting:
<biertie> but, I also want to thank you for your blog post
:p
<mchua> ah, thanks!
<biertie> because I’m considering stopping school -_-
<MooDoo> biertie: why?
<biertie> because they don’t care about foss
<MooDoo> that’s not a reason to stop is it
<biertie> I wanted to help loupgaroublond out, and do a project for them
<biertie> and it’s not good enough, because I could learn something from it!
<biertie> #wtf
<MooDoo> ?
* mchua wrestled with similar things as an undergrad, would be happy to talk with you about this.
<mchua> biertie: if schools don’t care about foss, and everyone who cares about foss leaves school, who’s ever going to bring foss /into/ schools?
<biertie> so then I send a mail to them, about open source, and the about a changing world and blah blah
<biertie> and he thought I was rude then
<biertie> mchua: good point
<mchua> You may decide that you’ve got better things to spend your life on than fighting that fight for however many years you’ve got left, and that’s fine. It is a long and thankless one, but it does make a difference in the long term.
<mchua> biertie: Yeah, it’s a hard balance to strike, and it’s also hard to know how administrators and profs will respond sometimes.
So maybe I should stay at school, and try to fight the big forces in our school, so we can have lessons in a culture where they DO care about foss, and maybe even work with it!
Let me know what you think about it!
So here’s the thing, Bert: you’re not alone.
Everyone in academia involved in FOSS – from students to professors to administrators – is working on the same thing. Slowly. Often behind the scenes – out of necessity – where others can’t (yet) see it. Ask the other Campus Ambassadors. Ask Matthew Daniels, ask Adam Miller, ask Chris Tyler, ask… you know these people. They can learn from your experiences. You can learn from theirs.
We need our best people out there, in the trenches, in the front lines, where People Don’t Yet Get It. We need to make sure that we support each other and remind each other that we are not alone. I’m sure that someday when I’m back in school and you’re the one who’s graduated and out in the world, you’ll be reminding me of this when I go “RAAUGH NOBODY GETS IT.”
It’s a war we’ve got another 50 years to win, if we need it – remember, we’re younger than our teachers are.
(And my posts are CC-BY, so quote and remix away.
A bus driver that drives me to the work does not care about free software. Nor does a seller at the grocery store I buy my snacks at. Oh god, what a compelling reason to stop using their services.
Why turn free software into religion? If you find it fine to judge others by what do they not care about, you really should quit that school, and pick a theology faculty instead.
That said, are you really sure that the school doesn’t give you enough chance for free software involvement? Aren’t you just expecting too much from it and too little from yourself?
@lubomir: off course, I can do whatever I want next to school (like work for fedora), but their seems to be no way to get my school more involved.. why do they not support the call for a project in open source?
Well I understand how you feel, it can be infuriating at times because proprietary ways of doing things is largely successful because of companies influence on academia.
The sad truth is that because the colleges are focusing on proprietary ways of doing things, recruiters tend to deploy proprietary systems.
Its the chicken and egg scenario.
My college for example has close ties to microsoft which basically results in lots of talks from microsoft and no talks from any other software group.
It also means that most of the systems are deployed with microsoft software.
This creates an arrogant and biased view for the students because they are not given all of the facts. they are unable to make their own educated choice because they are not given a choice.
You are trying to take down a giant with a spoon.
My advise to you would be to try and understand the system, get a yourself an education, work your way up the ladder and smack it in the face with a large trout.
Oh and if people chose to use microsoft and proprietary solutions over open that is their choice, but the education systems responsibility is to give students facts to allow them to think for themselves.
“off course, I can do whatever I want next to school (like work for fedora), but their seems to be no way to get my school more involved.. why do they not support the call for a project in open source?”
It depends on the context. Some schools don’t care whether your thesis is open or not but require that it be closed until it is graded to stop plagiarism and to not make the grading system too complicated a task.
There’s a third option: self-employment. If you know your stuff and you’re able to work independently, this may be an option for you. Active (technical) open source involvement sells really well. (a religious compulsion to “free” software is rather less helpful).
Note that self-employment is not the easy option though.
hehe, I know, I have considered self employment before, but I think you first need to be *good*..
Or better than I am at the moment, at least
Hey Bert,
Please don’t quit school! Even if you have a hard time getting support for FOSS there, you’re still learning skills that will be valuable for you to bring to the FOSS community. I don’t really think I could be capable of doing the things I can do today without my education.
And FWIW I had to use Windows and Adobe products throughout my schooling because the open source tools for design were not there yet. It wasn’t until 2005 that I could really quit Adobe products. So things are getting better overall. Academia can move slowly sometimes though, if you keep pushing it’ll get better faster though!
Don’t quit school. Having a degree is valuable, and it will be useful later on, regardless of what the degree is in.
Don’t quit school, honestly, or you’ll end up like me, going back to school at 30 to finally get that degree…
Since I only read this now, I apologise for the late comment. Still I was compelled to answer this.
Bert, leaving school is not the answer, simple as that. Leaving school is part of the problem. In reality, lots of schools have lots to do with F/OSS. Our school just happens to be one that doesn’t. In the grand scheme of things, our school is linked (via an associative agreement and stuff) to the university of Leuven. In Leuven, they use quite the lot open source, and I’m convinced this will eventually slowly affect the choices in our school too.
Apart from that you must consider the fact that school isn’t alone in its decisions. Our school merely (somewhat merely at least) follows the guidelines which originate in our genius government. If they tell schools to educate their students in Microsoft Windows ™, the schools don’t really have a choice in the matter (let’s teach them linux instead…)
In the end, it will not matter whether or not you will stop this school, since just one person never makes a difference (especially when playing the quitting move, bad choice imho)
Remember though that only through hard work and patience the F/OSS movement still exists, don’t insult it by making rash decisions in the name of F/OSS movement. Rather learn what you can and look for a job in F/OSS afterwards. It’s not impossible.
Oh, and having a job in a F/OSS “company” (more like supportive company) and helping that company grow as great as possible will eventually have its effect on the government, or at least the client base of the company.
It’s up to you, of course, but I wouldn’t quit school if I were you. Me, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be able to do what I can today if not for the fact that I graduated from Karel de Grote’s IT course back in 2001.
Sure, the amount of Open Source-related knowledge I received was rather low (there was some stuff, like a unix course for instance). But Open Source is not everything, and it is good to understand other things. Provided that the knowledge they give you is independent enough from the technology used, I would advise you stay at school. Most techniques can be easily adapted to other technologies (which you’d need to do anyway if you choose a life in the computer industry), and the bite-sized knowledge that is presented to you in a school or other educational institute is usually far easier to understand than the whole gobs of documentation you find on the ‘net.
Sure, it might seem boring or unnecessary to you now; but believe me when I say that you’ll come to fall back on the things you’re learning in a few years.
Put otherwise: if you’re smart enough, have enough background, and have some code to show for it, it’s usually easy enough to find a job in the Open Source industry. If you’re smart enough, I’m sure you can do that all by yourself. But getting that education makes doing all that afterwards (or during your education) so much easier.
HTH,
Bert
Mel is basically right as far as she goes, but she is a young kid. There’s stuff after “get hired”. Most of your life, in fact.
Now here’s the thing, to begin with, you not only got to get hired, but you need to get hired doing something you like. If you don’t like it, you won’t be good at it. And who wants to spend their life doing a mediocre job of something they learn to hate?
So fine, you go to work at some really fun job, you get to be the best in the world at it (and that particular goal is surprisingly achievable), but after 5 or 10 years all the challenge is gone. It becomes boring, and you need to do something else. This is where school pays off. Those boring, irrelevant classes turn out to be just the ones that open the door for you next challenge. I don’t know why that is, but it never turns out to be the relevant classes that matter; it always seems to be those ones that had nothing to do with anything.
And don’t get all wrapped up in a particular operating system, methodology, language, or way of doing things. By the time you retire, Linux will be that quaint operating system we used back at the turn of the century, only of historical interest. I would hope that the philosophies behind open source will still be around, but you can count on them looking to be a lot different than they do today.
To some extent, it is kind of a game. You get that degree to have the greatest number of opportunities. Initially, the objective isn’t so much the skills you got in school as having the background to convince as many people as possible to hire you. In the tech world, any job you catch will be light years ahead of whatever you learned in school anyway. It isn’t the specifics of what you learned that matter, it is the foundations, especially learning to learn, learning how to approach problems, and most of all, learning to communicate. School gives you a relatively low pressure place to hone those skills, so that you can then excel at them when you get into the game.
Those skills will serve you throughout your career, and if you are lucky, that career will be nothing like anything you can imagine today.