Traveling Thoughts

I am in my final semester of college.  I’m taking two 400 level courses.  One being mgt461, the final course of my MIS degree and the other being mgt498 the capstone course for any business student.

In my 498 course we were told that if we were looking for an easy course we were in the wrong one and should switch sections because we were gonna have to work….fine whatever….the professor however, in the opinion of several students is a pretentious schmuck….i however, don’t care much because i don’t have the energy to waste on this professor because i’m gonna be busy wasting it on my 461 professor.

I just want to make it clear that my complaining about this class is more than justified.  I’m paying $600 to build a gaming site, something that we geeks do in our free time.  I’m also paying $600 to build it in a text editor, not a visual editor.  It will be hand coded.  It will be hand coded using old web standards and not the most current ones.  I’m gonna use tables instead of divs and css for the layout.

I’m paying $600 so that I can use Access as the database.  Everyone knows that no real company uses Access as a database for websites.  It’s either Oracle or SQL Server.

The worst part of this is that the professor is doing what the recruiters and employers have asked.  Apparently they’ve asked that we be able to code whatever from scratch.  From nothingness.  I do not believe that when they asked for something from nothing that they also asked that we use old skool technology. 

The part that angers me the most is that this is the final course of my MIS degree and I’m doing a project that means nothing.  It’s crap, pure crap. 

I had an idea for a site that I wanted to do that met the professor’s criteria.  It would make cash, content and community autonomously.  It got turned down, turned down because there’s no algorithm involved.  Turned down because students in the past have tried to do it and they failed.  And every semester the students say that they’ll do better than the last ones because they’ve got a better PR plan, etc, etc…it doesn’t happen.  They fail…a fricken challenge he wouldn’t even let me meet.  He wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do for my project.  No, I have to do a game just like everyone else.  It makes me want to do the site just to spite him.  Just to show that I could do it and that it is a success.

He was willing to make me a test though, and if I passed it he’d waive the course and if I failed it that would be my grade.  It made me furious because I shouldn’t be tested on stupid algorithms like tower of hanoi or sudoku.  That’s the kind of crap that we do in Computer Science (that degree that I’m no longer getting).

It’s gonna be a long boring semester.  I’m going to die of boredom in his class one day as he teaches us about how to code tables…