Sunday, March 9, 2014

A bit of a ramble.

I am actually relatively new to programming. It's something that I wish I had known about before starting college. It irritates me that I didn't really know much about computers before I took up chemistry. It's because of this that I floundered about in the first few semesters. It's this in particular that irritates me. Fortunately enough the mathematics courses and the General Chemistry courses that I took will go toward my new major. Still I feel as if I have put myself at a disadvantage. Yet, I still don't think that this was entirely my fault. When I was in high school I had some experience with chemistry, and I liked it. What I found was that chemistry was challenging and interesting. The notion that I could take something and make it into a new material was amazing to me. That with the knowledge of chemistry I would be able to do something significant. I thought that I would have had an advantage over my classmates when going into a a degree in chemistry as I had had two full years of chemistry in high school. It turns out that essentially all of what was covered in those two years was only about three months of the first semester. I enjoyed the work nonetheless but high school was a poor preparation for what was to come. I suppose that in hindsight I should have known that. Still I wish that there had been an opportunity for greater diversity in course work in high school. There is just so many fields of study that weren't really addressed. The uses of mathematics are left to vague notions that teachers never really elaborated on. The world psychology is useful everywhere from business to art. The interconnection between different scholarly pursuits are simply too diverse to include in the mere four years of high school. Yet, there has to be a way to expose students to a wider variety of occupations and provide real, meaningful information to them about these positions. I recall that a great many of my classmates left for college with the intention of becoming teachers. While this may be a noble pursuit it strikes me that this may be because they have simply had very little experience of potential employment outside of the school system. I have been wondering how it may be that a student might be exposed to the broad possibilities before them without having to go out into the world to seek them out. Right now if they want to know more about the world they have to try to teach themselves. It's a rather difficult task to teach oneself when you don't even know what you are ignorant of.