The Monastery of Suck

Have you been to Mount Awesome?

I wish I was there. I am currently spending my time at the Monastery of Suck, paying down some kind of karmic debt in California while getting my master's degree in Informatics.

And while school and everything that goes with it is definitely on the path to Mount Awesome, it's kind of getting me down. My girlfriend of four and a half years is three thousand miles away, I'm earning a quarter of what I earned while working full time, Irvine's social scene blows compared to Brooklyn, and I miss my father's cooking.

Not only that, I'm not sure that I like graduate classes in the abstract. Everything moves so fast that I'm not getting a chance to delve deeply into most of the subject matter. Instead of getting in-depth knowledge of one aspect of a topic in a class, most professors assign several readings that give you an overview of the entire topic and then move on.

I think that I would have been happier with a more generalized or more hands on approach, or perhaps a socratic method instead of readings. I love learning about programming and before I came to Irvine I kept up with fifty blogs daily, but somehow the structure of graduate school just makes learning lame for me.

I may be too much of an autodidact for school.