Title: A Personal View

Seeing as nobody's writing a personal view column at the moment I'm sharing some thoughts about what it's like to be doing a Computer Science degree. The content of courses will vary across universities, but there is something else I think prospective applicants should know about. This might read like a suicide note but please be assured that it isn't; it is simply an observation. Computer science students are reputed to be social misfits. In my case I had a visual problem that went undiscovered for 15 years so of course I was a misfit, everybody seemed to be better than me at everything and I would have felt completely worthless, but for the fact that I could think about algorithms and they couldn't.

If this describes you, be warned that taking a university course will land you in the midst of people who really are better than you at everything - well some of them are anyway. But that's not all.

From the last term of the first year onwards, the careers service will bombard you with material saying "you've got to sort out what happens after you graduate". And if you go to one of their workshops, they'll say something like "Write down in 100 words why an employer should choose YOU". And you sit there and think, "There's no reason on earth why an employer should choose me. I can think of at least half a dozen of my contemporaries who would be better suited to any job I'd apply for than I would. And there are probably more who I don't know." Everyone else scribbles down stuff along the lines of "I can do the job" but you're left thinking "ALL the applicants will be able to do the job - you don't apply for a job you can't do!" (And if you have something that employers can discriminate against, they will - you can quote equal rights laws as much as you like but you can't PROVE that it's affected their decision, so they can get away with anything.)

(Incidentally, I saw a recruiting ad the other day that said, "Are you the best coder you know?" They won't want me then.)

And then you might think, suppose you did apply for a job and so did somebody else, would you want to do them out of a job? I wouldn't. Competition is not for the altruistic. I'd rather do a PhD and make some discovery (actually I'm thinking of a very specific one but let's be general here), because that would be something that's unique to me, that nobody else would have done if I hadn't. So I'm not treading on anyone's toes, that would "justify" my existence and would be a much better thing to tell my folks than "oh I've got some random computer job the other side of the country". Or I could do the same discovery in a job, if it's a suitably unique job that nobody else would do and if the result of any discoveries would be free for anyone to whom money matters. And pigs might fly.

You just try PhD hunting in the second year. It is not fun. Everybody's too busy with final year students and it's difficult to get anywhere anyway. Apparently the best approach is to find some supervisor somewhere who's so eager to supervise you s/he'll make sure s/he can. That's not easy. I don't like the thought of having to do it in the final year, what with final exams and so forth - knocking on locked doors takes a lot of time. Added to this is the fact that, if it goes wrong, I will have nothing when I graduate.

Because the course is getting more difficult (especially the theoretical parts that use notation I can't see), I decided to read ahead over the summer. I looked at the recommended books on last year's final-year syllabus, chose topics to concentrate on, telnetted to the library computer to see which books were available, went to the library and got them on vacation loan, and realised with horror that I held in my arms four huge volumes totalling nearly 3000 pages of small print and mathematical notation. And what was that about everything else I was planning to sort out over the summer?

What about being your own software house? Not that I can do marketing, but it's not unknown for marketing people to partner up with you if you can write a program that's worth it. If anyone says something like that to me, the first thing I say is always "only if it's free to those for whom the money matters", and then I reflect on the fact that it's no good talking about that because the computer industry has overtaken me. Every useful little utility I've coded has already been done by somebody's "killer app" (sometimes without even being documented).

I was recently having a conversation with someone who told me (as if I didn't know) how bad my programs were in a sighted world. I cannot write the user interface that sighted people expect, and that's all that seems to matter. Besides, every useful program I've ever written turned out to only duplicate the functionality of somebody else's program somewhere, with the exception of my web access gateway and various obscure features of my music program that nobody ever uses. Want to market that? Nobody has ever registered it despite the fact that registration is free. (I meant to port it to some more modern operating systems over the summer, maybe as a cut-down version, but only because I might need it for my final year project.)

The main point I am trying to make is that being an undergraduate these days seems to be all about worrying yourself sick about your future. They say it is the happiest days of your life. If that's true then I hate to think what's coming next.

How about some responses from those who can remember what it is like to be young, idealistic and trying to learn.