Re: I want to contribute and chose right project for graduate thesis

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

>> Well, yeah. Actually it is not the huge
>> egos that is the problem. What I menat was
>> - some time one these lists and groups
>> people have an attitude to newcomers that
>> isn't good, either they are reluctant to
>> give good answers, like they answer in very
>> short sentences, *or* they do the opposite,
>> write several pages with details which the
>> newcomer won't understand much of, and then
>> they start speaking among themselves and
>> the newcomer obviously doesn't feel
>> encouraged to proceed with the project.
>
> I'm not sure whether I agree. A short answer
> may be quite good. It may give a pointer -
> a starting point to learn. And if someone
> doesn't get it, they may always ask
> further questions.

Obviously not the kind of short answer
I refered to.

>> Right. Like most other things it is better
>> to learn that along the way. Many educations
>> work like that way by the way. Like CS.
>> They don't teach programming, at least not
>> here they don't. It is just something you
>> are expected to pick up while doing AI,
>> databases, interfaces, and what have you...
>> And it makes sense! Universities should be
>> theory and practice that is oriented to the
>> theory, not to the practice itself.
>
> +1 from me. May I hang this quotation on my
> office's door so that all students can see
> it? ;-)

Well, I know it is the right attitude, but
perhaps the quote isn't that good because one
could get the impression that practice isn't
important. Which of course it is. It is the one
thing that produces result and the one thing
that ultimately will give self-confidence and
joy of work (or "joy of activity"). It is just
that anyone who is determined can do it and
sooner or later it will happen. Theory and
knowledge which isn't acquired at school or
with higher education is much, much more
difficult to obtain on your own. And a fraction
of the people do it. But of course it could
happen - in theory :)

Also, if you get theory and knowledge from the
university, practice becomes much more fun as
it gets another dimension. And if it is more
fun you tend to like it more and do it more.

> Really? I did two master's degrees, and both
> were finished JIT. And I'm not an exception -
> many, many of my colleagues did
> a similar thing.

My CS education of 5 years took me 6 years,
7 months, and 12 days. 365 days a year.
Perhaps 1/3rd of the extra time was because of
my perfectionism, the other 2/3rd were due to
wierd bugs, incompatible software, missing
libraries, circular dependencies in Makefiles,
recompiling LaTeX a zillion times, you get the
idea, basically everything that hasn't to do
with a lack of theoretical understanding.

And I know this to be very common.

> Well, in maths, theory is basically all
> you've got;-)

Don't you have number crunching machines at
least and other kind of tech equipment?

But math is the most abstract science, save for
perhaps logic which I don't know maybe people
consider part of math, or math being the
implementation of logic perhaps?

And math *is* a youth thing! All the guys that
get awards are in their late 20s and then they
go to India to become mystics in their early
and middle 30s.

You want the award? You can't *handle*
the award!

:)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573