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11:09 PM · May 16, 2021Twitter Web App

The second was a junk CS course which taught out of date programming practices and provided very little in the way of historical context or the theory underlying what we do. It was a big disappointment and but did help to get my foot-in-the door in some internships.

Replying to

I dropped out both times due to personal reasons. But yeah, you don't need a degree to do this stuff. I do however think that degrees *can* be helpful, and universities do a lot of great work, especially if they aren't forced to follow short term demands from industry.

To give some more insight into what was so great about the design course: I went in wanting to create original work of my own, but had no idea how to do that, and was intimidated by all the great art that other people were doing.

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Rahul Goma Phulore

@missingfaktor

· May 16, 2021

Replying to @brendanzab

I would love to know more about how art practice and art history influences your work!

In the span of a semester, they had completely obliterated the idea of originality by way of art history, showing how even the most celebrated artists and designers drew a lot from other artists and their unique historical and cultural contexts - and that this is a good thing!

Via history, they also showed how many things we take for granted today in art took place over generations of work, by many different people. New ideas an approaches don't come out of nowhere in sparks of inspiration, they take time, effort, and learning from others.

They also taught practical stuff at the same time via life drawing, helping you unlearn a bunch of bad habits, and building a process of deliberate and continued practice. A lot of that I had to continue to work on over the years, but I do trace it back to that first semester.

My approach to programming and research is very much like the approach to design and art I learned at uni. There's a lot of developing a sense of taste and seeking out influences, creating my own approaches based on what I see and what interests me.

May 17, 2021

To be clear, I’m definitely not claiming that my haphazard approach is the right and only one, more pushing against the more subtle gatekeeping behind the original post - ie. it is implied that the degree’ that engineers must is a ‘technical’ one.