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Topic #46: Share one thing you wish you learned recently (ninja skills, teleportation, etc.).

One thing that I wish I had learned recently is that the computer science course that I’m taking right now is not actually as interesting as I thought or as I was hoping it would be.

For a majority of my life, I’ve been interested in computers in general, and I’ve always wanted to learn more about how they work and how I can use them to my benefit. For mainly this reason, I initially decided to major in computer science at my university. However, during my first semester, I began to notice that my first ever computer science course at my university was not at all the type of computer science that I was interested in doing. The course covered useless material that had no real-world application. We spent an entire semester leaning about things that most people adept with computer programming could have learned in less than a week by searching on Google. The homework and programming assignments we received were poorly constructed and unrealistic.

If I had known that all computer science classes at my university were like this, I would’ve immediately switched majors to something more applicable and realistic, but I decided to take another computer science course, hoping that it would be better than the previous one.

I was wrong.

I just took my first exam for my second computer science course at my university, and even the exams are poorly designed. It’s essentially impossible for the test taker to demonstrate the extent of his or her knowledge in the course material because the questions don’t cover enough breadth of material and are so cryptically written.

If you ever come to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to major in computer science and actually learn something that will capture your attention and interest, then don’t.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 18

Number of times I did my own laundry: 1