My university forced me to take a second language for a CS degree. The department was located in Arts/Sciences, not engineering where it belonged.
It was a perilously stupid waste of time. It required 14 credit hours. 14 credit hours of learning a language I will never speak to anyone ever again and never had any interest in learning. The only thing the language requirement does now is make the CS degree at my alma-matar less competitive since I would have taken more CS/Math/EE electives.
21 or 18 hours of humanities is enough. I'll get down-modded for being this way but I don't care. This was the reality of the situation. It genuinely hurt me. The only way it changed my life was make me miss out on interesting elective classes, like AI or computer music and I also didn't have enough time (in semesters) to do undergraduate research.
Give it time, man. Your priorities will change. Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you to learn.
It took me 5 years before I appreciated the German I learned in high school. I was in Bangkok airport and met a German woman that didn't speak a word of English. She asked me something, and I understood it. I opened my mouth and a complete sentence came out in a language that I'd never truly believed that people actually spoke in real life. That was the moment I got it.
So yeah, wait and see. Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across Guatemala, burned out on writing code, and thanking that stupid university for forcing you to learn a foreign language.
Wow, talk about missing the point. The point of university (or used to be before they turned into high priced vocational schools) is to teach you how to learn. If you didn't learn AI or computer music in school then what's stopping you from learning on your own. In fact, you could enroll at any university right now and take those electives as audits.
And the 14 credits you took to learn another language barely cover what is required to speak that language. So congratulations you have the same vocabulary as a 7 year old native speaker. The school did their part. They got you in the game. How you go about the rest is entirely up to you.
No, I didn't. I understand the point of university is to learn. I did a lot of learning on my own. I get that. I'm not some idiot that you make me out to be.
The point is that it took way too much time. The one thing I didn't have enough of and it impacted my future career. The reason I had to take 14 hours is because some decades ago, some inflexible bureaucrat decided that we need to "understand" each other and created this idiotic requirement. Now, in the 21st century, that ideal is becoming irrelevant and of course the language department won't let this change. This, as you can probably tell, has created a lot of resentment.
Let me be clear: We had to take 14 hours because of departmental politics, not some hypocritical ideal about how the university is for learning.
I can't take them at the university because I don't have time now that I'm working. Also, there are somethings that I just need guidance on. So maybe I am a moron. Whatever.
It was a perilously stupid waste of time. It required 14 credit hours. 14 credit hours of learning a language I will never speak to anyone ever again and never had any interest in learning. The only thing the language requirement does now is make the CS degree at my alma-matar less competitive since I would have taken more CS/Math/EE electives.
21 or 18 hours of humanities is enough. I'll get down-modded for being this way but I don't care. This was the reality of the situation. It genuinely hurt me. The only way it changed my life was make me miss out on interesting elective classes, like AI or computer music and I also didn't have enough time (in semesters) to do undergraduate research.