stripethree

A recently got a reply from a current professor that only left me more frustrated. I thought about posting a line-by-line analysis of it, but decided not to.

I wouldn’t even be ticked except that this email, and the annoyance it caused me in it’s lack of useful information, personifies my experience with this class, and to some degree, this program. This professor is complacent about answering emails and sparingly posts to the class message board that he constantly encourages people to use. Homeworks have been given with material that (admittedly) wasn’t touched in class and there have been numerous points where the professor has answered questions on assignments by admitting a lack of knowledge of what he has actually assigned. Apparently he’s not only having trouble reading my emails, but is also having trouble reading his own assignments. I never stay the full class because I can read the slides myself and I don’t need him to read them to me, which is essentially what he does. Any question I’ve had could be answered through the Java Doc or Google, because, well, I’m talented like that.

It ticks me off that this what you get for $2350. That’s right. Read it again. $2350. Twenty three hundred and fifty dollars. That’s a lot of Frosties. One third of a turbo kit. Four car payments (sadly, I wish it were more than 4). Point being, why am I spending that $2350? It ticks me off that time and time again professors in this program show a general lack of interest in their students. It’s so painfully obvious that most of them are working or doing research and are teaching ‘on the side’ and really don’t care what you pull away from their course. That’s what I miss about Maryland. Many, I’ll even say most, of the Computer Science professors made sure you got something out of their course. Even if they did so by causing you great anguish and pain through programming assignments that bent the sleep-time continuum or exams that fried your brain so hard you had to bring something to wipe the drool up. It was challenging, it broke people, and when you finished, you felt like you’d accomplished something. You survived. This program, this grad program, with it’s stale course notes, reused assignments, and class sessions that do nothing to keep students interested, it isn’t going to feel that way. It’s going to end, I’ll get my piece of paper, add it to my resume, and probably not speak much of it again.

It feels pretty shitty to question the value of this degree so close to being finished. Beyond the point of no return. To some degree, it’s a $25,000 sham: I know that a Masters from Johns Hopkins looks good, real good, but is it just skin deep? How much new knowledge and ability am I really gaining for that much money, because there certainly are times when it feels like I’m just giving them money for them to check some boxes, pat me on the head, and say, “you did some work, your check cleared, here you go!”.