Category: Education

Posted on

When your mindset isn’t the problem: getting adaptive training when you need technical training

When you hit a certain stage of your corporate career — like being a woman of a certain age, but better paid — you may end up in a lot of development training for various reasons, or pointed at coaching, or both. I learned, in one of these, a very useful distinction, what people development curriculum designers call adaptive challenges vs technical challenges.

Technical challenges are skills gaps, basically. You don’t know Australian tax law. You don’t know C++. You’re not a very polished public speaker. You aren’t well networked enough with senior leaders.

Adaptive challenges are when you’re getting in your own way. You learned C++ but you can’t bring yourself to apply for the job. You’ve practiced your public speaking but you turn down opportunities to do it. You know lots of people and they think highly of you, but you never ask them for help.

It’s possible to have both challenges at the same time, and for difficulties in one to inhibit the other; say, your dislike of attention (adaptive) is getting in the way of you investing in your public speaking skills (technical). But there’s also a huge tendency in corporate people development to spend a lot of time on adaptive challenges, particularly for underrepresented groups and in equity programs, relative to the investment in technical challenges.

My belief about why this is is that addressing adaptive challenges simply scales better. Whether someone is in finance or activism or programming or real estate or medicine, the techniques you teach them to get them OK with asking other people for help more, or asserting their opinions more, or for assessing their own work fairly, are similar. You don’t need to find someone with an overlapping professional background or from the same field to address adaptive challenges, and you can draw on an entire community of teaching and coaching practice. And on the provider side, you can position yourself as a coach who teaches assertiveness in a wide variety of fields, rather than someone who trains assertiveness for non-profit accountants!

It may also be a comforting story to tell yourself about your equity practices: probably the reason that underrepresented people aren’t succeeding in our organisation is that they’ve internalised messages from somewhere else, probably some large and uncontrollable force outside, that they aren’t worthy! Fortunately, they are now on a level playing field in your organisation and all you need to do is help them out of the mindset that other forces taught them.

Whatever the cause though, the result is a similar pattern to vague feedback holding women back. If what is stopping someone progressing in their career is that they don’t know enough about Australian tax law, at some point they just need to learn more about Australian tax law, and assertiveness training doesn’t have a lot to add. And they or their employer are going to have to do something not as scalable as assertiveness training to address it.

For employers: don’t leap to adaptive challenges as the answer for your equity problems. If there’s technical challenges, you are going to have to drill in to individual or small group teaching, or invest in external programs that require considerable time and money investment. (Their adaptive coach might encourage them to take an hour every week to reflect on their goals, but their taxation law professor is going to flat-out require that they pass exams.)

Managers: track investment in someone’s development over time: if an employee did Overcoming Impostor Syndome and Unlocking the Big You last year, you should question whether The Light Within is the course for this year, relative to the entrance requirements for a masters degree or a rotation into a team that writes more C++. Work with people to ensure that there’s investment in the actual skills they need to progress as well as into their mindset. In the worst case, you are really selling someone very short if you help them be big and bold and proud and self-actuating, and then you don’t listen to them now that they know enough about themselves to know that they really need to learn more C++.

Posted on

Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In my years on the ‘net, I’ve seen any number of people want to interview others or get them to take surveys for everything from a short high school or undergraduate paper through to graduate research projects and books. And they so seldom manage to meet basic ethical guidelines for making sure they aren’t wasting their participants’ time at best or endangering them at worst. Hence this article.

In addition, this article may help research participants better assess requests: are researchers telling you what you need to know? Have they considered your interests as well as their desire to Find Something Out At All Costs?

Full disclosure: I am not a research ethics expert, I am simply a researcher helping you get the basics right. Please seek expert advice if you have any doubt about the safety or integrity of your research.

Why do I need to do this stuff?

Because you’re so often asking people sensitive stuff, that’s why!

Look, I have some sympathy for the “it’s just questions about something-seemingly-small!” myself. I ask people questions about their linguistic intuitions. “Which sentence reads better to you, A or B?” There’s nothing less fun than completing a 31 page ethics application to get approval to ask people about which sentences read better.

But look, all research, at best, takes up people’s time. You owe people something for that. In addition, quite a lot of the research people are recruiting for on the ‘net wants to get into harassment of women, political affiliations, sexual experiences, why people write slash. That kind of stuff? That kind of stuff in the wrong hands loses people jobs and relationships. You owe people serious, well thought out harm mitigation for that.

So, ethical research recruitment lets people know what they’re getting into, whether it is a boring half hour sharing linguistic intuitions, or sharing potentially damaging information with a reseracher.

The bare minimum

All researchers asking for participation should share this information:

  • Who are you?
  • Who do you work for or who commissioned this work, if not yourself?
  • How can I get in contact with you, and how can I get in contact with who you are working for?
  • What is the purpose of the research?
  • What is the status of the research? Is this sheer curiosity that made you whip up a survey in five minutes, or a pilot study, or the main game?
  • What kind of effort do you want from me? (Interviews versus surveys. Five minutes versus many hours. You get the idea. Tell me upfront what my time investment is.)
  • When you’re done, where can I see the results?
  • Will the results be made public and in what form? (A peer-reviewed article? A PhD thesis? A pop science book? On your blog?)

Some of this might be the sort of thing you want to put on a webpage you can link to, so you can leave short advertisements like “Hi, I’m looking for help with X, and thought readers here might want to help because of Y, if you need to know more, please see LINK.”

You;d be amazed how many people miss the “When you’re done, where can I see the results?” step. Even if they’re asking people for 20 hours of interviews or something like that. For anything but the most trivial investment of time, letting people read your results is the minimum reward required.

Also, results being made public can often be good: the subject’s work is contributing to the sum of human knowledge! So don’t consider this necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.

Institutional research

If you are doing research at the postgraduate, postdoctoral or faculty level, research using human subjects (and other animal subjects for that matter, but you aren’t likely to be recruiting them on blogs) requires ethics approval by an institution-level ethics committee in most institutions.

So, when soliciting participants for research that has ethics approval, provide the following info:

  • All the bare minimums plus
  • A statement citing your ethics approval in whatever manner is usual. Your committee probably has boilerplate. Typically this will name the institution, give a reference number for your experiment and provide contact details for the ethics committee.
  • If your ethics committee approved a recruitment advertisement, use it! If it’s long put it at the other end of a link if that’s OK with them.
  • If your ethics approval requires that you disclose a bunch of things, also state them or place them at your info link if allowed.

If your institutional research didn’t require ethics approval (some institutions might, for example, have a blanket policy covering low-risk things like linguistic intuition questionnaires) find whatever boilerplate they let you use instead, if there is any or say something sensible along the lines of “This questionnaire comes under the XYZ University Low Risk Experimentation Policy [link].”

Basically, if you are doing research on behalf of an employer state either that you have ethics approval, or if not, why not (eg, your institution has no committee).

No committee but doing something sensitive?

If you’re doing sensitive work outside the oversight of ethics committees, here’s the start of your checklist!

  • All the bare minimums plus
  • Are respondents going to be anonymised in your personal/researcher copy of the data? Are you stripping any associated names, IP addresses, email addresses and similar? If not, what are you keeping and why?
  • How are you storing the researcher copy of the data?
  • Who has access to the researcher copy of the data? (Yourself? Your boss? All of your boss’s present and future employees? The Internet?)
  • When do you plan to delete the researcher copy of the data, if ever?
  • Are respondents going to be anonymised in the published results? If not, what identifying information will you publish and why?
  • Can a respondent withdraw their participation and be deleted from your data or transcripts? How do they do it? How long do they have to do so?

There are all kinds of other factors that ethics committees would get you to look at, basically, what capacity for harm does your research have? How are you mitigating that harm? What risk to your participants is left?

Risks include: physical health risks; mental health risks (more common with online data gathering, eg, triggering questions); exposing people to relationship disruption or breakdown, or abuse (by, eg, asking them to discuss infidelity); exposing people to criminal prosecution (eg by asking them to discuss illegal drug use); exposing people to civil liability (eg by getting them to discuss breach of contract), exposing them to job loss; denying them the best treatment or resources (by, eg, giving preferential treatment to patients or students or employees who agree to take part in the research, thus harming others); and coercing participation in general. And there’s one question that frankly stands out to me as a member of the apparently rare species Lady on the ‘Net, which is “are you studying an over-studied population and if so, what benefit does this extra research have for them, as opposed to for you?”

One of the most obvious mitigation strategies is anonymity of your subjects in reports, and eventual data destruction of any private identifying data. But as you can see from the examples related to coerced participation, it isn’t the only strategy you might need. List your possible harms, list your mitigations, let the potential subjects decide if the research is worth it to them.

Related

I wrote a similar post focussed on software development a few years back, in that case mainly focussed on “prove to your subjects that their participation is not a waste of their time.”

Posted on

Sunday Spam: crepes and maple syrup

As just fed to my son, in fact.

The execution of Troy Davis and the death penalty

I donated to the Innocence Project and the (US) National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, for what it’s worth.

Fukushima Disaster: It’s Not Over Yet

The impact of both radiation and fear of radiation on Japanese society, although it feels a little shallow. I’d love to read this argument from the perspective of a Japanese person.

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac

Struggles to come up with anything nice to say about cul-de-sacs, frankly, unless you are in the business of selling either cars or fuel for them. Oh, they’re quieter. Other than that, cul-de-sacs suck.

Queen of the Kitchen

A Christmas-time fairy story by Karen Healey. So you know it’s got a tough-minded teen girl, New Zealand, and magic. Several of my favourite things.

Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…

Science Based Medicine reviews the real position of chemotherapy. It works as the primary treatment for a fairly small number of cancers, it doesn’t work much at all for some cancers, and much of the time it is part of several treatments (radiotherapy, surgery).

On Feminism and Virtue

Sady Doyle reflects on the extent to which being a feminist makes you a better person: potentially not much.

The Great American Bubble Machine

Goldman Sachs: always there to turn a functioning market into a speculative bubble, and thence to profit. Highlights include 100 million people entering hunger in 2007 due to speculation on food and oil futures. This was via Tim O’Reilly, who went down to the Occupy Wall Street protests because even rich small-government types do (or ought to) have a beef against Wall Street.

Disability Culture meets Euthanasia Culture: Lessons from my cat

On the normalisation of euthanasia in animals, to the point where vets can’t advise on what death of natural causes is like, and its relationship to euthanisa in humans. I was thinking about this issue over the last few years, most recently after a vet euthenised my parents’ elderly pet horse after what my father, who works in the meat industry and has seen hundreds if not thousands of animals die—and some seriously negligent treatment of animals for that matter—described as the worst suffering he’d ever seen. So, I don’t have a lot to say about Tony’s death, but it did make me think about how animals die.

Certificates and “authorities”

The certificates that identify websites for secure web browsing, that is. Basically, it’s a mess. There are about 400 organisations that are trusted by browsers to sign the identities of secure websites, they get hacked quite a bit, and some of them are careless at best about security.

Movin’ Meat: Instinct vs Expertise

An ER doctor puzzles over why a neurosurgeon isn’t taking a certain fracture seriously. Unlike a lot of stuff I link here, this is less about systemic concerns and more just an interesting story.

The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books

From early last year, more in my attempt to understand publisher perspectives on ebooks. I’m in an interesting place on this, reading both in the open source/copyright reform world which tends to accept and embrace the tendency of the sale value of intellectual property to fall to zero or nearly so once distribution is cheap (see for example Copyfight on ebook prices rising), and librarians, publishers and authors who aren’t so hot on that happening to books.

Anyway, now I know what the agency model is.

Do We Need A New Nirvana? Does Modern Music Suck?

Joel Connolly (my brother-in-law, and a band manager) thinks audiences need to wise up to existing awesome music, basically. It’s a longer version of what he said to Bernard Zuel early in the month.

Above reproach: why do we never question fidelity?

I like this style of inquiry. Basically, the question is that everyone agrees that infidelity (not having multiple partners, but having multiple partners without being honest about it) is unethical. But should we? Is this sometimes part of oppression?

Every so often, asking these questions of human relationships is important. (Note that the writer, also, doesn’t have an answer.)

Increasing Barriers to College Attendance Through ‘Optional’ Extracurriculars

Something I’ve wondered about for ages, as Australian universities, which largely admit students based on pure academic performance, are constantly criticised for not moving to the US model, which takes into account the whole person, yadda yadda. As long as the whole person has time in their life for charity work, sports teams, student politics etc. To me, US college applications often sound like high schoolers applying for a Rhodes scholarship straight out of school. Not that raw exam scores don’t incorporate endless privilege, but extracurriculars do not in any way ameliorate that.

Posted on

Quick hit: NSW Coalition drops active anti-ethics classes policy

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Coalition folds in ethics class battle:

THE state opposition has dumped its promise to remove ethics classes from NSW public schools if it is elected, as 57 schools prepare to start teaching the new course within weeks…

In November the opposition education spokesman, Adrian Piccoli, said a Coalition government would remove the classes being offered in schools as an alternative to special religious education, or scripture classes… ”We voted against the legislation, so once the legislation passed through the Parliament there was a recognition that ethics classes are going to be in place,” he said. ”The view was it has been legislated and we are going to allow them to continue. The battle over ethics classes is finished and we will be part of it.”

Note to commenters: Hoyden has had fairly long discussions of the ethics classes before, see related posts below. Many commenters here (of course, not all) would probably ultimately rather see SRE abolished entirely and religious education designed for adherents or potential converts conducted privately out of school hours, and ethics and non-adherent religious studies treated as a regular part of the curriculum (as they already are to some extent).

Lauredhel had some interest comments on my last thread:

If anyone reading knows a child attending the ethics classes starting this term, it would be interesting to hear their experiences. (Privacy concerns permitting of course.)

Posted on

Ethics classes to be offered in SRE time in NSW

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

the logo for the NSW Government Dept of Education and Training over a picture of a highway sign that reads "Ethics"Ethics classes in special religious education time (SRE) are almost certainly going ahead in NSW, in 2011 at least.

Background: Special Religious Education (SRE) is a period of time, up to an average of one hour per week, during which students at public (government) schools receive instruction in religion from volunteer representatives of that religion. The parents of the child nominate which religion of those offered locally (in some but not all schools, this will be limited to Christian denominations, here’s the full list of approved providers). They can also opt to withdraw their child from SRE entirely, but if they do so the school can provide supervision but not alternative lessons:

3. Schools are to support SRE by ensuring that no formal lessons or scheduled school activities occur during time set aside for SRE. Such activities may create conflict of choice for some parents and for some students attending SRE.
…
10. In times set aside for SRE, students not attending are to be separated from SRE classes.

11. Schools are to provide appropriate care and supervision at school for students not attending SRE. This may involve students in other activities such as completing homework, reading and private study. These activities should neither compete with SRE nor be alternative lessons in the subjects within the curriculum or other areas, such as, ethics, values, civics or general religious education. When insufficient teachers or accommodation are available, the school’s policy on minimal supervision will operate.
…
14. The principal retains an overall supervision responsibility for the conduct of SRE. Class teachers are not required to attend SRE classes, but may, with the agreement of the SRE teacher, assist or remain in the classroom.

An ethics alternative in SRE time was developed by the St James Ethics Centre. Their FAQs may be useful in understanding more about their classes and the background.

The report (PDF, 0.8MB) into the trial classes is available, and here’s some material from its introduction:

The findings of the evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the course in relation to improving students’ understanding and skills in ethical decision making, and the overall appropriateness of the course content, activities and resources and of the associated training. The evaluation also points to the success of the organisational model employed by the St James Ethics Centre, and considers the viability of this model for wider implementation of the course in NSW government schools…

The call for a secular ethics-based complement to SRE in NSW schools is not without precedent, and there is evidence here that secular ethics and SRE can exist respectfully side by side. In this evaluation an attempt has been made to assess the extent to which the ten week ethics pilot provides an appropriate model for an ethics-based complement to scripture, and to do so on the basis of rational argument and empirical evidence. Further decisions rest with the Minister.

There’s been some back and forth since:

  1. The NSW ALP government announced that rollout to schools would commence from 2011, starting with classes offered to Years 5 and 6;
  2. The Liberal opposition, which will almost certainly be elected to government in March 2011, announced that they would reverse this and withdraw classes if elected.
  3. The government announced that the ethics offering would be put in legislation, which will be difficult for the post-March government to reverse without support of minor parties in the state upper house.

My interest in this is long term: I have one child, and he’s a baby. But I am an atheist, and likely under the current system I would opt him out of SRE unless he specifically asked otherwise, and under the new system I would place him in the ethics classes unless he specifically asked otherwise.

I would, in fact, like him to be familiar with the history and teachings of the major religions in Australia. My own schooling was quite indifferent on that front. I attended Catholic primary and high schools, which do not have the SRE system: all students participate in scheduled classroom lessons on Roman Catholic beliefs. (In my experiences, not very robustly taught itself: the doctrinal positions opposing use of contraception came as a considerable surprise to my fifteen year old peers. “Bullshit, Miss.”) The secular state curriculum also seemed to lack much insight into religion or religious influences on culture and politics (and vice versa). The major exception was the Studies of Religion unit in Stage 6 (Years 11 and 12, the final two years); at my school we were offered a choice between a school developed religion course which would not count for university entrance, or the Studies of Religion course, which did. (Stage 6 has been considerably revised since, but this course is still available and you can see the present syllabus.) I attended Catholic schools for thirteen years without hearing about the split of the Democratic Labor Party from the ALP in 1955, for example. The ethics classes aren’t a cure-all for that hole in the curriculum, but they are not intended to be, nor should they be: that kind of material should be offered in the standard curriculum.

What do you think? If you have a child will you or would you have them attend the ethics option in SRE time? Will you or would you volunteer to be an instructor? (The website that is being built at primaryethics.org.au has contact details for would-be volunteers.) I am considering volunteering in 2012 assuming that the classes remain in place and that work and parenting commitments don’t make it impossible (as they likely will.)

Posted on

Sydney University colleges: after “Define Statutory”

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Last year, it was revealed that the residents of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, who had formed a “Define Statutory” Facebook page that described itself as “pro-rape, anti-consent”. There was a lot of heat around it, and initially a lot of words and not a lot of action. Lauredhel and I wrote about it here last year (University colleges: nurturing a rape culture, More on St Paul’s College “Define Statutory” facebook page).

I’ve been meaning to find out what happened next for ages. Here’s what seems to have happened.

In February 2010, the University Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence announced that the sexual harassment and discrimination policy was being extended to all student residences. (The colleges’ residents are almost always enrolled students of the University, but the colleges are independent institutions.):

[Spence] said his handling of the website scandal… had been hampered by the old policy, which excluded the legally independent colleges, leaving them free to conduct their own investigations without guarantees of an independent inquiry.

”It is fair to say our old harassment policy gave us no teeth as far as the colleges were concerned,” Dr Spence said. ”However, under the new system we definitively would be able to discipline those concerned.”

The vice-chancellor’s office has called for the residential colleges to review their sexual harassment and assault policies as well as student initiations and unofficial activities.

In an email on Tuesday [February 23], Dr Spence told all students that they ”had the right to be treated with dignity and respect, irrespective of their background, beliefs or culture”.

Heath Gilmore and Ruth Pollard, Sydney University expands sex-assault policy, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25 2010

The new policy (dated 11 February) is here.

Ruth Pollard, who wrote the Herald‘s original stories, wrote in February that she regarded St Paul’s response as continuing to be highly unsatisfactory, especially in light of the administrations of the other colleges being willing to criticise their own culture:

We received another email from Dr [Ivan] Head [warden of St Paul’s], describing St Paul’s as ”one of the most exciting and stimulating places to live, brilliantly in the heart of the university, fully engaged with every aspect of student life, punching above its weight, moderated by wise and astute scholars”.

Oh yes, and all forms of sexual assault are abhorrent.

Since then, Dr Head says there has been an investigation which included ”interviews with the [Facebook] site administrator who is a former college resident, and a small number of current college residents who had agreed to become members of the site”, but he refused to release the results of the inquiry.

Ruth Pollard, Time to wake up: St Paul’s must stamp out its misogynist culture, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25 2010

I am not surprised to find though, that there are reports that St Paul’s residents have closed ranks around their college:

First, some history. In 1977, a group of St Paul’s College students at Sydney University held an awards ceremony in which a student who raped a woman was applauded for committing “the animal act of the year”. Then last year St Paul’s made headlines again after a Herald journalist, Ruth Pollard, exposed a “Pro Rape/Anti Consent” Facebook group run by students at the college…

While the scandal has made the students more media cautious, it does not seem to have affected their attitudes towards women. Earlier this year, a number of St Paul’s students planned a musical dance revue number titled Always look on the bright side of rape. The number was canned for fear that it might invite media coverage.

In the end, the villain of the revue was called “Ruth Pollard” and students hissed, booed and threw objects when the character appeared…

Nina Funnell, Contrition trumps sexism cover-ups, The National Times, September 22 2010.

I can’t honestly think anything other than that it will be a long long time before college culture changes a lot. There will be a lot of social pressure on and additional harassment of students who attempt to go through the university’s procedures as outlined in their policy, just as there has been of students who have gone through the legal system in the past. College songs, folklore and culture will continue to very explicitly promote sexual harassment and assault. I will be interested to hear if the efforts of the administrations of some of the other colleges are serious, sustained and effective over the next few years.

Posted on

University colleges: nurturing a rape culture

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Warning: this post has graphic quotes from and links to mainstream media accounts of rape culture and imagery, and sexual violence.

One of the profoundly disturbing aspects of rape culture discussions—and this won’t surprise readers here—is the way that they reveal the confident assumption that there are rapists, who are evil and other and unresponsive to any form of social control, and then there are the rest of us, who can be exposed to any number of conflicting messages about rape—sexy rape, not-rape rape, that-type-of-girl rape, he’s-such-a-good-fellow rape—and emerge with our anti-rape moral compass intact.

There is no single place in my own experiences that taught me that this is wrong more thoroughly and dramatically than university residential college.

Continue reading “University colleges: nurturing a rape culture”

Posted on

A degree in computing?

This is a re-publication of an essay I originally posted on a now defunct website in September 2004.

I’m obsessed with understanding the minor failures in my own university education, probably unreasonably so considering that I have two undergraduate degrees, good mental health and a debt to the Australian government that will buy them only one new low range car.

Nevertheless, there are a few striking things about a degree in computer science that I’ve learnt through experience, and thankfully sometimes through the experience of others, that I think are worth noting for the record. This essay is a guide for people considering starting a undergraduate (bachelor-level) computer science degree or computer science major. I’m going to lead with the negatives: I think people should think more carefully before starting computing degrees, and degrees in general for that matter. But as I don’t actually regret the degree, I will conclude with some positives.

Why you may not want to do a computer science or computing degree

You aren’t suited to university

By this, I basically mean that you don’t want a degree. Degrees are what universities think their purpose is. Degrees are annoying things to get. In most universities there’s a complex set of rules governing which subjects you have to take in which combinations, which subjects you can’t take, how many subjects you can take, what marks you have to get, and what level of courses you need to do. They almost invariably involve at least one time-serving course which is totally uninteresting to you, and one boring but difficult course which you need to put a lot of work into.

Once you jump all those hurdles they let you wear a silly hat.

Further, universities are geared towards students getting degrees. If you show signs of not being such, like repeatedly failing courses, or simply doing too many low level courses and not enough final year courses, they have a distressing tendency to try and throw you out.

Further, at least in Australia, you can get by without degrees in computing fields. Their official function is to act as a stepping stone into academia, or as a heuristic for employers to demonstrate that you are capable of completing a long, and more than somewhat arbitrary, list of tasks in order to achieve a goal (employers are in the long and arbitrary tasks business too). They also indicate a certain skill set. But they aren’t the only way to show that you have that skill set.

Larger organisations get a bit hung up on them. It can be difficult, for example, to get work visas to certain countries without a four year degree in a relevant field. As businesses get bigger, it tends to get more likely that “degree in relevant discipline” appears in the ‘mandatory requirements’ section of job ads too.

While failing to get a degree you wanted can be miserable, hanging around at university without much intention of getting a degree can be fun, especially in countries that have low tuition fees. My experience of people who do this is that they eventually get sucked into the degree mania and have some regrets, especially once their friends start graduating, but if you really want university without the degree I don’t have much more advice to give.

There’s good things about university too (later!) but if this description is making you grit your teeth and long to flee into a job, or possibly to the Himalayas for a good long hike, follow your dreams there instead.

You don’t like programming

To people who know about the content of most university computing courses, it will seem extremely strange that you want to do computer science at all. The reason is that university computing courses focus on one of two things: in the vast majority of cases, that is programming theory and practise with dashes of software engineering and a smidgen of computing theory (discrete mathematics, in other words); in a small minority of cases they concentrate on computing theory.

In short, if you are certain that you do not like computer programming, you should not do a computer science degree, with a few rare exceptions for people who like the mathematics rather than the programming and want to do a theoretical computing degree. Even in that case, check the program you’re entering thoroughly because almost all of them will have you programming much of the time. You might well be better off in a mathematics major.

If your bent is systems administration or other techie non-programming skills, you will also want to avoid most undergraduate courses, because they teach programming to the exclusion of what you’re interested in. There are a few exceptions to this, and you might find some interesting Masters courses, but be sceptical and enter programs only when you’re sure that you aren’t doing “programming with a dash of systems” when you want systems. It’s likely you could find relevant courses outside the undergraduate system, and it is worth considering skipping the whole thing and learning on the job.

In the, alas, most common case, where you have some idea that you might like to “work with computers” (or often, you would like to manage people who do), have no particular existing skill set above using your computer for email or gaming, but are certain that coding is not your thing, you don’t want to touch a computing degree. In the best case you’ll struggle through a semester or two, realise that it’s all programming and you hate it, and spend another semester or two establishing prerequisites in a different field. In the worst case you’ll push through three or four years wondering when you’re going to learn ‘industry skills’ (meaning management). You aren’t. You’re in a programming course. Definitely skip the whole thing. Do a little research and find a faculty or major that teaches the skills you want or the things you’re interested in.

There are a number of non-programming computing majors, normally called ‘IT’ or something similar (although not always, some ‘IT’ courses are also programming courses). These generally have varying amounts of ‘basic computing’ (using office products), system design, project management, database design, and business skills. Computer science students tend to look down on these courses, but the few people I know who’ve done them say that the management skills they teach can be worth it. The only thing I’d warn about if you’re thinking of one of these courses is checking whether you like programmers themselves. If you find them insufferable or laughable, you’re going to have a hard time managing them and it might not be worth training to do it.

You have no idea if you like programming, because you’ve never done it

I know several people who started university in this category, two of whom graduated from computer science with highest honours. Unlike loathing programming, it’s not a death-knell for your enjoyment of the course. In addition, at least in Australia, all computing degrees assume that you cannot program when you begin them (the University of Sydney claims that, except for a few very experienced students who earn excellent marks easily, the difference between the experienced and inexperienced in terms of marks is negligible after three months).

Nevertheless, before committing three or four years and a fair bit of money to a programming degree, you may want to get a basic idea of what it is you’re going to be doing with your time. There’s a few options: there are a lot of online programming tutorials these days and many free toolkits — a lot of your programming is going to be self-taught anyway, so you could start out that way. You could also take a summer course at a technical or community college. Which one you want to do may depend on your personality: as a beginner I spent a lot of time trying and failing to think of interesting practise projects, so I guess I was a course-type person.

Programming is difficult and frustrating initially, but allowing for that, having a little programming experience will help you decide whether you like it enough to spend years listening to people talk about nothing else.

You love programming and are very experienced

By this I don’t mean that you got high marks in high school computing courses (or at least, not that alone). People who can program to the extent that they get high marks in your average high school, but not a great deal more, will probably find computing degrees really useful: you will meet people more skilled than you; you will find many of the assignments at least somewhat challenging; and while you will probably begin to find the lecture courses dull, they won’t cause you to attempt to pound your lecturer’s head through the wall.

Even in this case, you will find the early stages, which are aimed at the non-programmers allowed into the course, quite frustrating. But it’s quite likely that you will learn a great deal in the later years of the course, from courses and especially from classmates. You might well emerge ready to program professionally. In case you can’t tell, this is the category I entered university in.

But if you’re experienced to the extent that you’ve written working 10 000 line (or much more) projects for fun, have programmed professionally, or have done extensive work with others, you are likely to find at least the first two years so insufferably tedious that you may well be tempted to turn violent. Anyone who is a major code contributor to a medium sized Open Source project almost certainly falls into this category.

In addition, you may not do very well. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be doing programming exclusively. In most computing degrees, your first year will include mathematics courses, and depending on the institution, it will probably also include at least one business, engineering, or science course. Your programming experience will probably not help you pass these other courses — which is not to say that other abilities, such as good mathematics skills, writing skills, or a good memory won’t get you through them — and the mind-numbing simplicity of introductory programming risks convincing you that you can pass them as easily as you will programming.

Or will you? Mostly, yes, with blindingly good marks. But alas, programming courses will often involve just enough theory to trip you up if you aren’t interested in some of the theory, or neglect to flick through the textbook: you’ll code up a storm but be unable to remember precisely how pushdown automata work when it comes to the exam (unless you ever coded one of course!) This is sometimes more the case as the degree goes on.

Some people who are experienced programmers might prefer to do a related degree with new skills (like mechanical or electrical engineering); a theoretical degree with a lot of maths, since they’re less likely to have taught it to themselves already; or a completely new field, if they want an extended break from their programming. Others might skip the degree. Otherwise reconcile yourself to the tedium a bit and try and seek challenge in your fellow students and your teachers, not your courses themselves.

You have no academic interests aside from programming

As above, most university degrees require some semblance of balance in your courses for a few years until they finally let you geek out on an all computing extravaganza. Annoyingly, some of these courses will also stand in your way — in particular, failing maths may stop you proceeding in computing.

If you really cannot stand any of the other subjects that are likely to comprise your program (make sure you investigate what these are) or aren’t going to be able to pass them, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting to the interesting bits of computer science inside the university system.

I did a science degree with maths and computing, and an arts degree with linguistics and philosophy: the first is a fairly typical computing degree. Other common ones are engineering based courses, which will have a lot of maths and physics with the programming; and business based courses, which will have accounting and management, and sometimes a touch of maths, with the programming. Some universities are very flexible and will let you do, say, metaphysics and computing, others stick to traditional patterns. But at least in Australia, computing degrees without non-computing course components are rare.

Why you may, after all this, want to dance to the university tune

I think I was actually a fairly good candidate for undergraduate computer science. I have reasonable mathematical ability, I’m a better writer than the majority of my fellow students (this became relevant during the last year of my degree when I did a research project), and at the time I entered I had some programming ability but very little experience of projects that took more than three hours to complete.

I ended up getting a lot out of my computing degree, and in this section I’ll discuss some of the things you could get out of it.

You will meet other students

I actually think this is the single major reason you should consider undergraduate studies at all. University is an easy way to make friends. You will be exposed to a wide group of people who like you are confined to the campus much of the time. Making friends after university is harder because the range of people you meet daily falls and it’s hard to see a lot of them, especially in cities where you may live two hours drive from your colleagues and friends.

I have a typical geeky high school sob story, although it’s on the mild side because it didn’t involve being assaulted or attempting suicide, it just involved loneliness. I arrived at university more or less convinced that I was terminally unattractive to my peers.

After considerable time (I spent five years at university) I left with quite a large group of friends and acquaintances, an immeasurably improved set of social skills, and a much better self-image.

In computing, in particular, your peers will have a lot to teach you, assuming you find a good group of people. Computing students tend towards the obsessive and will spend a lot of time teaching themselves and each other all about their findings. It’s probably more the rule than the exception that you will learn more programming skills from your peers than from your teachers. (This doesn’t seem to be true in other science disciplines, and is only true in the humanities when your peers are exceptional.)

‘Networking’ deliberately is a bit yucky, but the natural process of meeting people with common interests and hanging out with them will introduce you to people who have a lot to teach you. If you end up getting a job through these people eventually, you’re in good company.

The course discipline can be useful

Computing courses will tend to set relatively fixed assignments that force you to practise programming skills, although some teachers are far better at this than others. At the university I went to, these assignments were also very open-ended, in that you spent about three days getting 80% of the marks and then for every mark after that the time you spent would increase. While this was both good and bad (some students deliberately chose part time studies in order to improve their marks at the cost of an extra year’s study) it did force me to practice.

If you don’t, early on, get sucked into an intense group of hardworking programmers (and talented programmers can be among the world’s best procrastinators) the discipline of the coursework will improve your programming skills. In my case, and I only really did hobbyist programming in the final two years, the early improvement was huge.

You have the chance to study other things

A lot of people hate the elective requirements of some degrees, particularly if essay writing and mathematics don’t come easily to them (you’ll likely need one or the other), but undergraduate studies are one of the very few opportunities you’ll have to learn about a lot of subjects from experts in the field, some of whom will be marvellous teachers. In some cases — mathematics and science particularly — it’s very hard to learn about the field later without course discipline to push you along, in other cases it might just expose you to something you can follow up at leisure.

I gained two major interests from non-computing study at university: language and modern history. One is likely to be part of my career path, the other is filling my bookshelves. I wouldn’t be without them.

You’ll get the piece of paper

In most ways it’s an arbitrary measure of ability to finish a regimented program, but for some career paths you need it, and it might well make you happy to have it. I quite like having mine, I even gamed the system for a fifth major. In hindsight I wouldn’t do a five-year pre-honours program again (and I wouldn’t do high level maths after second year because I wasn’t committed enough to it) but I’m pretty happy about it overall.

Creative Commons License
A degree in computing? by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.