When I was in high school, I found classes frustrating sometimes. As much as I knew I needed to do well, I always wondered, “when is this going to be useful?” On one hand, I don’t want to undermine the value of humanities classes and broadening your horizons. Just because a class doesn’t give you a direct marketable skill doesn’t make that class unimportant.
But sometimes I would sit in chemistry class and wonder what my education would look like if I had more choices. I haven’t balanced a reaction in years, but I find myself now without basic statistics knowledge that would have been so great to learn back then, and probably just as enriching.
One way I got around some of these problems was by taking online classes in what I was particularly interested in: math, computer science and writing. These free online lectures taught by university professors are called MOOCs: Massive Online Open Courses. I would have weekly assignments, occasional quizzes, and would often end the course with a project.
The amount this helped me in college is surreal. I was lucky in that my high school taught Java, but with MOOCs I entered college knowing MATLAB, Python and Lisp, as well as public key cryptography and the basics of editing. I’ve included the links to some of the sites I used below. If you’re ever sitting around bored and looking for ways to get the most out of your education, I couldn’t recommend these sites more. The advantage I had entering college was huge.
https://www.codecademy.com
https://www.coursera.org
https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://www.khanacademy.org
https://www.udacity.com
-- Joanna Slusarewicz
But sometimes I would sit in chemistry class and wonder what my education would look like if I had more choices. I haven’t balanced a reaction in years, but I find myself now without basic statistics knowledge that would have been so great to learn back then, and probably just as enriching.
One way I got around some of these problems was by taking online classes in what I was particularly interested in: math, computer science and writing. These free online lectures taught by university professors are called MOOCs: Massive Online Open Courses. I would have weekly assignments, occasional quizzes, and would often end the course with a project.
The amount this helped me in college is surreal. I was lucky in that my high school taught Java, but with MOOCs I entered college knowing MATLAB, Python and Lisp, as well as public key cryptography and the basics of editing. I’ve included the links to some of the sites I used below. If you’re ever sitting around bored and looking for ways to get the most out of your education, I couldn’t recommend these sites more. The advantage I had entering college was huge.
https://www.codecademy.com
https://www.coursera.org
https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://www.khanacademy.org
https://www.udacity.com
-- Joanna Slusarewicz
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