For those of you even thinking about college for any computer related career, this blog may provide some insight to you. At the very least, it should show you what particular school to avoid if you do your research. I will even throw in some clues at the end.
In 2005, seeking a better future for myself, I transferred from a community college in Los Angeles to a well known university in California. What I hoped to be a useful experience in learning computer science turned out to be the biggest waste of time and money in my life. Before you start going off on how universities teach you to "learn to learn" and "degrees are useful" and "it's a good experience" and other soft, politically politically, brain numbingly cliche arguments, please read my TRUE experience. It is true because the events have happened. I don't like to insert too much opinion about why or how. You will be surprised.
Where should I begin? Playboy? Egg drops? In4matix? Maybe I can begin with the teacher from Italy. Dr. H. M as it were, did not bother to realize he was in America teaching students who spoke, listened to, read, and wrote English. His software tools and methods turned out to be Italian tools and methods. With such words like "Promela code" and "Bucci automation", who was to understand what he was talking about? Even the tools he provided us for use were in Italian.
Ok. Maybe this was just a fluke. But the worse was yet to come. Plowing through my courses, I soon realized I had made a mistake in attending the university. A professor, whose main claim to fame is in meeting a famous singer on an airplane, mistaught his networks class. Not only did he allow the TA to teach us that meters/seconds and seconds/meter were the same unit in the context of network latency, he ENDORSED his TA's mistake when the question was brought up. T.S are the professor's initials. M.J are the TA's initials. No it doesn't stand for "Marijuana" although he could arguably have been on it. Neither does it stand for "Mathematical Joker". Although it should have.
Still worse, we were required to take a technical writing course to earn our degrees. After my registration in the course, the course was immediately cancelled by the Informatics department and replaced with a course from the English department. What ensued was a waste of time analyzing "l33t talk" and reading about he sociological impacts of computing and pondering about contradictions in logic. I don't think it could have been better if I had taken the informatics version. When others took the course, they soon were working on how to play with Legos.
Back to the egg drop. What professor finds an egg drop as being relevant to concepts of programming languages? I don't know. Maybe a professor who thinks bubble wrap around eggs gave us some knowledge about bubble sort in various programming languages. Maybe a professor was is nuts, or looking for material, or lazy, or incompetent. I will never know but I certainly participated in an egg drop during my Concepts in Programming languages course. Just like the one I participated in while in elementary school.
What else could go wrong? At one point, one year into my studies, I considered dropping out. One might rationalize staying in school just to get a degree, but in retrospect, the one and a half years I could have used to gain real useful experience and knowledge would have been so much more to me.
Even more painful still was the arrival of a guest speaker in class one day. This speaker was from the In4matix department. Yes. You read that word correctly. This particular school spells the word "informatics" as 'In4matix' in the school catalog. I can only imagine what the diplomas would look like . Back to the speaker. The paper found here: http://boingboing.net/2007/11/28/film-review-2-girls.html is probably more useful than this speaker's research. When asked by a student what her research was applicable to, and what the purpose of it was, her response was: "Sometimes research does not have to be useful. It can be done just for fun". Now I just have to say WHAT THE FUCK.
For the juicy part, I save it until last. You were wondering how Playboy would fit in to a schools reputation. For your reward in reading through this, you will soon discover the school in question by reading an issue of Playboy. A double whammy for you in my opinion, no double entendre intended. No, it wasn't named as a #1 party school, if only the school was so competent enough to be #1 in anything. One might expect a prestigious school to have research published with ACM or the like. Not with this school. I guess the professor's research was so new and soooo provocative, it could only be mentioned in Playboy magazine. A pornographic magazine. The gist of her research? "Those who are interrupted at work are less productive". I had to see this issue of the magazine. Not just because it was Playboy magazine. Lo and behold, there in that issue of Playboy magazine with Vida Guerra on the cover, was a small fact mentioning our professor's prestigious research. Playboy, if you're out there, please verify this fact. For the rest of you, go out and find yourself a copy. You won't be disappointed.
If you aren't into sifting through pornography, I will give you one last hint. Fanbox, aka SMC,aka Plaxo, aka Spambox, aka what reputable company needs to change their name so much, is allowed to post jobs on this particular school's job listing site. The school's defense? "We don't monitor or filter postings. We just try to make it easier for students to connect to the industry". I guess the school would like all it's graduates to associate with those who break the law and spam the Internet.
Since I graduated, most of the computer science courses at this school have dissappeared. They have had all their names changed to "In4matix 101 Introduction to OMGWTFBBQLOL " or the like. I have taken on in an internship where I might learn something like Spring or Rails or TCP network programming on Unix, all things absent from said school.
I only wish I could've known before attending this school that it would have turned out this way. I only hope now that some investigation goes on that radically changes the way that school in question operates. Thanks for reading.

Disgruntled Alum