Why did I leave the university

But, … one week later, I thought “What the hell was that?”. I was, modestly speaking, a bit disappointed. What was the point of the dull lectures, when all you do is you write down word by word what the teacher reads from the book… Every single day… That didn’t sound like too much fun. Of course, I assumed I’m wrong and didn’t understand the hidden purpose of this ancient ritual. So I did everything that we were told to do in the beginning.

Hopefully, I started to learn online in addition to the material in the university. On the second year of study, I still didn’t discover the purpose of that establishments and started working. On the third year, I was working full time and visited the university only to pass the exams. On the forth — I co-founded my own company. On the fifth — I quit, couldn’t stand it anymore. Even the beggings of my parents to stay didn’t help.

The Ukrainian higher education is dead! We have to admit it! It’s absurd to deny it!

Dear friend, I won’t talk about how irrelevant is the material in the current program, how outdated it is. That it needs to be infinitely more agile and flexible. I won’t write what percent of students work in the profession they studied. How useless is the diploma to get a job. That for most of the professions you need months of studies, not years.

From my observation at the KPI, that there are mainly 2 types of teachers in the universities — the complete losers and the volunteers. And guess who’s in the majority?

I won’t write about all the hundreds of alternative ways to study and learn.

All of that you can easily find on the internet and the statistic is horrible.

Instead, I’ll only share with you what is it actually like studying at the KPI.

If Einstein was alive now, he’d worship the Ukrainian lectures.

You know why?

Because they mastered the time, and seem like they can control it. No, really. How else you could explain that the teacher can schedule the lesson at some time, and arrive 2 hours later. Regularly. Only if he believes that everyone has endless amounts of time. Or when you completed the laboratory work and want to get a mark, you cannot just do it. You have to come to the class, take a place in the queue, and wait for 1 or 2 hours until the teacher finally comes to you, glances at your work, points at small mistake there, and tells you to redo it. Yes, and the next time you have to repeat the procedure again.

Looks like they all live somewhere next to the black hole so that the time goes slower for them.

The only problem is that we, students, are not time jedais and have to waste endless hours in the queues.

However, my observation is that those who stay long enough in the university, seem to understand that science. And they start getting the good marks not for their knowledge, but for their time spent. It’s a very interesting formula that I could never understand and unfortunately couldn’t practice.

The teachers think very highly of the students.

Too highly actually. So high that they think we could read their minds. So that they could spend all the lecture drawing electric circuits and graphics on the blackboard, without any explanation. We had to copy that and read their minds to understand what it all that meant.

And yeah, for the “security reasons” they couldn’t send the photo of the book or the PDF to everyone in the audience.

There was an interesting unofficial competition taking place. I’d call it “KPI’s got talent”. A lot of teachers took part in it and competed for the most stupid rules they invented.

Literally.

So students played songs, came in the different costumes, one student arrived on his hands and got the mark without any question. The girls competed to eat the cake on time. And boys could get a mark by bringing that cake. Once I arrived with a code written on my skin on the back to pass a hard topic. But Marik didn’t accept it then because the girl who wrote the code on my shoulders couldn’t explain how it worked.

It might seem funny … for the first few times. But the third year in the row of such “circus without animals” performances, you’re completely fed up.

These are just a few stories I shared. There are dozens more of them. What’s interesting, most of my friends from other universities shared similar stories. The slightly better experience was probably only in the “UKU” and “Mohylanka”.

I’d summarize the university as an enormous time waste machine! Of course, there were many good things about the university and I don’t regret going there. But it’s only because I stopped visiting it not too late.

I believe that with this approach we’ll all live in a better world!

If you find this helpful, click the 👏 below so others can enjoy it too.

Related posts:

One Sunday afternoon, mid-August 2011 we drove past Underwood playground in Brooklyn and realized it was the first day in 4 months, where we were NOT there. Right around the time Luna’s legs started…

Unlike other platforms, mobile is a unique environment which requires comprehensive knowledge of the development lifecycle. Before CI/CD, mobile developers must handle many tedious works in order to…