A year out of college (almost), and where do I find myself?
by John on Oct.24, 2006, under Personal
Most of you reading this know at least a little something about me. If you don’t then I welcome you to my weblog and hope you enjoy your stay. It’s ok; you can go to another site without reading anything here and I won’t think any less of you (yes I will). For those of you who are still reading, most of you are family, or friends, and know that I graduated from College in December of 2005. I suppose that would also be obvious to anyone who read the title to this….
Where have I been this past year, what have I been up to, what’s new? The answers are pretty straight forward. I’ve been in Indianapolis, my hometown, running a company with a friend from high school. I’ve been building an enterprise class network from the ground up in an effort to provide a stable technological foundation for that company to succeed. I’ve also, within the past few weeks, taken over control and responsibility for the company’s software development. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really prepared for any of this.
I may not have been prepared, but I didn’t shy away from the challenge. I have been forced to learn new technologies, to look at requirements and devise solutions that are cost effective, and allow for all of the capabilities we require to operate. We’ve built a solid, enterprise level search engine that allows for price comparison of nearly anything a young adult would be interested in while mobile. In the process I’ve learned a lot about network engineering, network security, systems administration on a large scale, moreso than I ever learned in college. I’ve also learned more about my personal abilities ( namely that I am awesome. Yes, I’m modest.), and have expanded those abilities. I’ve grown as a computer scientist, but also as a manager. I am, in some cases, applying what I learned in college courses. In others I’m flying by the seat of my pants making decisions that in reality, are just gut reactions to the situations at hand. Throughout all of this, though, I’ve realized something. Nothing you learn in college, will ever truly prepare you for the real world. Enjoy college, kiddies, life’s a lot more serious out here in the real world.
4 Comments for this entry
Leave a Reply
Photos (view gallery)
My Tweets- @jasonbfrench happy birthday frenchie!!
- Love the new menus - so much lighter! (@ Scotty's Brewhouse) http://4sq.com/52j5tI
- Hoping for a good day today (@ ExactTarget w/ 2 others) http://4sq.com/692jRm
- @JoelLesher my fave right now is "The Underdog" by Spoon
- So... I've never played Starcraft before... Should I get Starcraft 2? I will let you all decide.
October 25th, 2006 on 11:55 am
Heh, yep, school/colleage only goes so far as far as preparing you for the real world goes…
October 25th, 2006 on 12:33 pm
Very true. I was quite surprised by how little it actually did prepare me for the real world. Sure, it gave me some skills, and a foundation from which to build on, but I didn’t expect the real world would be as different, and demanding, as it has been.
October 25th, 2006 on 3:53 pm
College was a totally different experience to High School but there’s still that feeling that what you learnt during your time in education is all a bit… theoretical until you’ve put it into practice in a real world situation.
October 25th, 2006 on 4:14 pm
For sure. Education is meant to give you the information you need to succeed in the real world. It doesn’t necessarily tell you how to use that information, though. It’s all theoretical, It’s completley and entirely up to the individual to actually apply the knowledge to acheive some arbitrary goal. I guess it’s not so much that college didn’t prepare me, more that it didn’t prepare me in the way that I had expected it to.