lleger

She's not a real engineer if she doesn't fail by herself. Of course, by fail I really mean try and try and eventually get it right. What should you do? Tell her to quit engineering.

Reading through the comments, it's clear that you've already gotten some good advice. Instead of answering your question, I thought that this quote might be helpful by providing insight into solving your problem.

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Don't think that I just dismissed your question and posted some obscure quote (it's actually Steve Jobs from his Stanford commencement speech). I've weighed this carefully because it's clear that you're at a crux; this is an important time and I'd like to impart as much as I can to you.

But, Steve just said it so much better.

Tarks, you really just need to follow your heart. And yeah, that sounds like a trite mantra, but I think that you'll find yourself in a much better position if you take the risk and do what you want—don't live in the dogma of society. Take action and do what you've been telling yourself you want all along. Generally, our heart really knows what we want better than we do. And when we follow what we want, things tend to have a way of working themselves out.

Sure, keep your perspective; understand how the real world works. But just do what you feel is right.

I hope this helps; good luck to you, man.

I work in the IT department of a major university and this is crazy. I'm also one of their students. You got a really cool service that solves a major problems for any large institution. Towards that end, this decision was probably made by a manager, who doesn't know much. All of the real knowledge is with the analysts. I'm sure that having an open dialog with them would get this changed. I doubt they'd keep you out with a little discussion.

Maybe I'm a pariah here, but I like PHP. Especially when I have teachers cramming C++ down my throat. But Ruby is a great language, too. I've had my fair share of fun with both.

I think the thing to remember is that as programmers we should be language agnostic. This is because we need to chose the right tool to get the job done. Granted, most times we can just choose our favorite language; however, there are times when, say, PHP would do better than Rails, or vice-versa.

I'm both a programmer for and an administrator for network infrastructure at my university. So the code that I deploy I have to live with. A lot of it was written before I got there and I probably really have deleted just about as many lines as I have written. Decade-old Perl code usually needs to be updated. And now with us switching to IPv6, a lot of things need changing.

It may be an unscientific poll, but if nothing else, it's interesting to see with whom we are interacting.

These are my top 10 in no particular order. They're basically what reside in my dock. I think you can really tell a lot about a person based on what apps they keep near.

1. Textmate 2. Transmit 3. Espresso 4. Adium 5. Tweetie 6. The Hit List 7. NewsFire 8. Safari/WebKit 9. Terminal + VIM 10. Pages

I'm not sure I've ever read an article that's more wrong.

First, refusing to an employer's criteria of hiring will never get you hired. There are more degrading things in this world than explaining technical, even trivial, things to a non-technical person.

Secondly, SAT or any other standardized scores aren't a test of intelligence. Even purporting so shows your level of intelligence. I know plenty of engineers and programmers who did poorly on standardized tests yet who are freaking geniuses compared to others who scored much higher.

Yeah, I agree that reviewing resumes more closely might be a better indicator of qualification than a phone interview, but I don't think they should be entirely forgone. They add an important level of inspection.

In early high school, I was a chronic procrastinator. I became really freaking good at it too.

Then I got to college and had to start doing work. Not because college is hard (it's actually easier than my high school), but because I'm much busier now.

To help balance things, I did a number of things. For one, I started putting everything into The Hit List. This works great and it helps me stay sane. Everything gets out of my head, which is important. The second was that I began practicing a process known as gatekeeping. Basically, you have to start making conscious decisions about what you allow into your work flow. (Shameless plug here: I wrote about gatekeeping on an introductory level here: http://loganleger.com/effective-gatekeeper/) This really helped me get down to business and focus.

I work far too much and far too hard, yet not quite enough or quite hard enough.

Yeah, it's a paradox, but anyone else building a company, working a regular job, and going to school will understand.

I play ultimate frisbee for my university. We play for three hours three days a week. That's enough exercise for me.

When it's the summertime, and, thus, when I have more time, I work out with the powerlifting team.

I also bought this book on Mann's recommendation. It was very good and thorough. Tharp is a genius and she really helped me focus my creativity more. I highly recommend this book, especially for us who are very left brained.

An important thing to note is that college admissions is really a terrible, fairly unscientific process. You're clearly qualified, so getting rejected shouldn't be a terrible thing for you.

To answer your first apprehension: being around like-minded people is incredibly important. Graduating from one of the best high schools in the nation, I was around people who were intellectuals so there was always wonderful discussions to whet and kindle my growing mind. Two years later, I'm at the local state university whose stigma is entirely accurate. Few people—even in the honors college—are true intellectuals. Living here has been an intellectual nightmare for me, and I can sense my acuity and mental agility suffering.

However, I really didn't have a choice. My family could not afford to send me anywhere else. Basically, the situation I got stuck with was this: paying $40k+/year for a wonderful, private institution or paying $0/year (including room and board) and getting compensated a stipend for the local state university which still made USNWR's top-tier colleges list.

And really, if you're going for engineering, then you're going to learn the same thing anywhere. I'd argue that illustrious universities really aren't a frugal choice. Graduating debt free is really going to free me up financially to start up my company instead of needing to find a job right out of school to fund myself. Also, the local state university offered a lot of options for testing out of classes, so I'm graduating in three years, as opposed to four.

One more thing to consider: student life. You don't want to be miserable, even if it's cheaper or a better school. I've known to many of my peers who went to their dream school and then hated their life. Consider spending time on campus and getting familiar with the local scene.

Good luck.

http://www.dotomator.com/ http://squurl.com/ http://domai.nr/