Dealing With Nonsense...

"When it rains, it pours..."

In the past, whenever things didn't go right, it would land me in a chair opposite of a psychologist, student advisor or other person who supposedly could help me. More often than not, these people have been providing wrong information, left options out, referred me to the wrong people etc. etc..

Right now, I'm once again in such a situation. I would like to go on with my life as much as possible, which is hard enough, but now I've got to deal with all this other nonsense too. I'll try to explain this briefly:


The university where I study Computer Science is a mess. Lectures and assignments don't match up, content-wise or time-wise. Over the last weeks, I've spent many, many hours trying to complete vague and sloppily written assignments which turned out to have mistakes in them, rendering them impossible. The teaching assistants are often of no help. In some cases, you're better off with a free Internet tutorial than the learning material provided.
Of course, mistakes can happen, but what really gets me is how the uni generally responds: 'hm?... meh... whatever...' They couldn't care less. And a lot of students have the same lethargic attitude and are happy to pass courses with the lowest sufficient grades possible.


Today, this happened: I sent an e-mail to a professor asking for extensions on homework sets. My tinnitus increased significantly over the last few weeks (probably due to stress) and it's rendered me quite unproductive. His reply silently acknowledged that I have a valid reason, but he won't give me an extension because he's "too busy to check even more homework sets." Which signifies that things are wrong on all kinds of levels.

The correct response would be to discuss this with the teacher privately, then go to a student advisor and then someone higher up the tree. But the point is, I don't have that kind of time and energy! I just want to get on with my life and not having to reshape an obviously dysfunctional institution.


Any advice on how to deal with these kind of things? The worst part is that this kind of stupidity seems to be inescapable, whatever you do in life. It's exactly this thought that can bring me down like nothing else...

Also, I'm wondering if this apathetic way of living is a Dutch thing. Does anyone know if this is any different in the US?

 

Hmm I'm not too sure tbh. My uni are really nice about the whole thing and offered me assignment extensions which I declined since (didn't want to spend much time on assignments when my exams are worth more). I think your best bet would be to see your uni support system if you have one, or head of department if not.

 

all I can say as the holder of a CS degree from a US school is that disorganized professors and completely irrelevant course material (lol java applets) did not prevent me from having a great career. Learn your flow control fundamentals, make some webapps, make sure to get your degree one way or another and you will be totally fine if the market there is anything like here. The company I work for now routinely offers us 5-10k USD to refer friends andcolleagues, and we have positions that sit vacant for months because we cannot find qualufied candidates who can code well enough to reach the (admittedly high) bar we set.

Even people who cannot code well and smell bad seem to do fine as contractors at shady design/build shops. I think that tech is unquestionably in a bubble right now, but milk it while it lasts, and bank those dollars...

pardon typos, tablet on shitty 3g connection, edit is hard.

 

Thanks. I know that that's the 'right thing to do', but taking these paths takes up a lot of time and effort and usually leads to no result... so I might as well not do it.

Well, at least that's good news from a making-a-living perspective.

The thing is, I don't want to live like this. I know it's unfair, they know it's unfair, and I just have to accept it, as I'll be even worse off dropping out. These kind of things happened at pretty much all schools I went to (from primary on up), it happened while I was in the music industry, and now it's happening again... at a place which should be built upon critical thinking, for god's sake.

And I actually don't want to go into the business world, but into research and education :/