Ask HN: How could I make things change in my crappy CS department.

[argarg]

Hey HN,

I'll be finishing college in a week. I attended what we call here in Quebec, Canada a "Cégep", which is between high school and university. It's a 3 year program in computer science. Unfortunately, it's overally worse than your worst nightmares. Now that I'm about to finish, I feel very bad for any future students of this program, and I want to save their lives.

My teachers have absolutely no interest in "staying up to date", and they've all been teaching there for over 10 years. So they will either teach this very outdated stuff, or pretend they know something new and give us links to look for. I don't need those links, my Google skills are much better than theirs, and so is my interest for newer technologies. I love programming and I'm lucky I'm one of the 4 students (out of 34) who will finish without failing a class, although I've been highly unmotivated all the way.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is, exactly 1/5 of the 3 years there were spent on learning Oracle Forms Builder 6i. If you don't know what it is, here is a link to a sample web app built with this: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/wp-content/images/jhsmig0.jpg . It is deprecated, will only run on windows XP or lower, keeps crashing, and is not similar to anything you can think of.

Enough ranting, my goal is to do what has already been attempted before, make things change. I plan on writing a letter to the school direction, backed by many other students, bringing many of the problems and solutions. Some other students have already made this attempt without success. I also plan on writing an open letter in the local newspaper to talk about the subject. The thing is it's difficult for me to explain what is wrong without giving any technical details, which would not be understood or taken too lightly. The whole department, every teacher, is problematic. So there is no one else to understand the technicality behind all this.

I don't want to fail like others have and I want to do something which will bring real changes. It cannot continue like this, I've seen too many students fail where they shouldn't have and lose faith in their future in this field because of this. What else can I do and how should I do it? I'm looking for any advice.

Thanks you

[petervandijck]

You can't change it from the inside. Writing a letter is a good thing (do it), but you can not make them change, and they likely won't. If you really, really want to spend time making change, you need to go to the highest level, ie. not the teachers or the directors, but whoever it is that they report to.

Probably the best thing to do: just make a site with some friends, http://dontgotoquebeqcegep.org or something, make sure it ranks above the school site (shouldn't be too hard) then move on.

[argarg]

Good idea about the website. Of course I don't want to spend a lifetime on this, so I'll move on after that. Thank you!

[dstein]

The best thing you can do is warn other potential students to avoid this program completely. Having a 3 year introductory course before starting university sounds like a complete waste of time.