Education - Part 4

The Negatives of Education - My Personal Experience
This is just based on personal experience - I might be blowing it out of proportion. 

I had been enrolled as a grad student in Compute Science (CS), specializing in Computer Vision.  I loved Algorithms, Computer Vision, and Computer Graphics courses, and learned a lot from my adviser and fellow students.

Computer Vision is one part projective/computational geometry and one part machine-learning.  The last semester, none of the CS courses offered were related to either of these subjects.  Between the time I'd have to dedicate to the course and the high pricetag ($2500 a course), I wanted to take something relevant to what I wanted to learn.  Independent study seemed like the only option. 

Then, the CS graduate coordinator sent a notification about a new psychology course that would cover multivariate analysis, and classification regression techniques (this is machine learning in a nutshell) and would apply it to fMRI data. 

This class was exactly what I wanted.  Not only would it teach me machine learning, I would get to apply it on useful datasets, and maybe do something positive with computer vision, such as find ways to early detect brain diseases.  My previous job was related to finding ways to early detect Alzheimer's - so this course doubly piqued my interest. 

I put these points together in a petition to the CS committee (a petition is required to take a non-CS course).   I thought this petition would be easily accepted, but I was wrong.  It was rejected, because of concerns that a psychology course wouldn't be as mathematically rigorous as befitted a course counting toward a CS degree. 

I found this to be a bit snobbish.  The psych majors I know are far better at math than the CS students I know, in general.  And the CS department hadn't even offered any machine learning classes for the last few semesters at ANY level of mathematical rigor. 

I felt that the decision to reject my petition was driven by some supposed superiority of the CS department over the psychology department. 

If I'm spending so much time and money on my education, why I can't focus on what I want to learn rather than try to follow some rigid guidelines for what I can and cannot learn based on politics more than technical merits?

I signed up for an independent study, only to find out one week later, that my adviser - the only one at the university who knew computer vision - was fired.  Thus the independent study was canceled.  Another professor kindly offered to step in and sponsor my independent study (with the caveat that she wouldn't be able to help me on any technical areas).  Though the offer was very kind, I felt it wasn't worth it to go through the university, if I would be effectively on my own anyway.  At that point, the only reason I'd be there would be for a degree. 

Thus, here I am, a disillusioned grad school dropout.

I do want to continue to learn computer vision.  It is a great subject that uses linear algebra and computer graphics, and a lot of engineering techniques.  It is fun to find out how to solve problems on real-world images with minimal complexity, and to explore trade-offs between accuracy and speed.  I really do love this subject, and don't think my learning will end because my status as student has ended.

Thanks for reading all these rambling posts.  I would love to hear your thoughts on these subjects.