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Scholarships From FOSS Organizations?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday March 22, @03:36AM
from the if-not-they-should dept.
from the if-not-they-should dept.
Athaulf writes "I'm a high school kid with big dreams of prestigious technology schools like MIT or Cal-Tech. The problem is, my upper-middle class family had more down to Earth plans for me and my college choices (about $30,000/year more down to Earth, actually), so financial aid and college savings won't come anywhere near MIT's price tag. However, I've been programming in C for a while now, and might release a GPL'd Linux app soon. With this self-taught programming experience, academic merit, and plenty of extra curricular activities, are there any FOSS supporting organizations who might grant me a scholarship for my contributions? Do companies like Google or Red-Hat offer scholarships to big name schools in return for a few years of work after college?"
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Education is an investment (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think that's too much, go to a good community college for the first two years, transfer, and still get that MIT degree. The introductory classes are generally taught better at some of these places.
Or, most states schools have great programs, diverse people, and provide excellent education.
And no, counting cards will not pay your tuition.
Re:Education is an investment (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty he didn't mean his parents would pay $30k, he meant they wanted to pay $30k less than what MIT costs. If they included housing costs, that means $15k/year, if they weren't including that then they would only be offering $5k/year.
Doesn't discount your other points, but I believe clarification was needed.
MIT's website... (Score:4, Interesting)
MIT's website says financial aid is guaranteed for admitted students.
http://web.mit.edu/sfs/financial_aid/mitgo_undergrad.html [mit.edu]
I suppose I don't have an answer to the original question, but get their financial aid folks on the horn and see what they have in the way of work study, internships, etc. Whatever you got back on your FAFSA probably isn't the last word in the matter.
study abroad (Score:4, Informative)
In a lot of European states you can get away with 0 in tuition fees or a very moderate fee of a 1000 per year. For $30k / year you can live a very comfortable life as a student in Europe.
Also, having studied abroad is something that would look very good on your CV.
You're just paying for the brand name. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what CS guys get at MIT that they won't be eligible to find at any other college. But if you work your ass of at any other college, with the grades and extras to prove it, I don't see how it matters.
Unless of course you just want to get the "MIT" label for the brand name.
Re:You're just paying for the brand name. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you go to an average school, you'll be surrounded by average students. On the plus side, you might stand out as exceptional. On the down side, you will have relatively few other students who are as smart, ambitious, and interested as you are. It does make a difference.
Re:You're just paying for the brand name. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You're just paying for the brand name. (Score:5, Interesting)
They must be, after all you've gone out of your way to post about 10 replies where you praise MIT (and the army up to some point) as the creme de la creme of the higher education you can get. I have this feeling that the way you're defending MIT, you are being a little too overzaelous.
At my previous workplace we had a rule "your degree and where it came from don't matter". I've seen a guy with a university degree in CS be outsmarted on a technical matter by someone who studied history but had a passion for what he was doing. We had a guy fresh out of high school who wanted to work a couple of years to earn some money before heading off to his higher education, and he was better at programming than some "educated" people I've had the "pleasure" to work with.
My point is that while many companies have a tendency to focus on a degree, a lot of companies don't. If you have a talent and you're willing to put that to good use, you'll be presented with enough opportunities. Yes, a degree is important, but 10 years from when you have obtained that degree your experience and achievements are much more important.
Re:You're just paying for the brand name. (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience has been that the difference between top private U's and state school isn't necessarily in the facilities or the faculty (at least with respect to well-funded state schools), but the degree to which your fellow classmates catalyze the learning process.
Any school, including small community colleges, will have some exceptionally intelligent and talented people, but taking a class with an excellent prof and 2-3 other people who 'get it' is an entirely different experience than when the entire class instantly absorbs the primary principles and the lecturer is constantly fielding insightful questions that illuminate corner cases, the underlying theory, etc. Then, when you're chatting after class, you find that it just so happens that one of your classmates did a graduate-level thesis on related algorithms in his junior year of high school, and you learn even more over some Chick Fil A.
You will occasionally have that kind of experience anywhere, but at the top schools you can have them pretty much daily.
Might work better if... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to get your Free software out there. It would probably look better if you had something you could show prospective sponsors, and this is where the versioning comes in. If you've got a horking great Subversion repository full of your code, with maybe a few checkins a day, then it shows the process by which you work. It's like showing your working on a maths problem - if you get the answer right but don't show your working, you won't get full marks. If you show your working and get the answer wrong, quite often you'll get fairly good marks anyway if the working is right but the mistake was a little arithmetical slip.
So in short, show them the code. And let us know if it gets you into college.
Mighta, woulda, coulda (Score:4, Insightful)
Might? By the time I finished high school, I had released at least 3 GPL'd programs that were entirely my own work, a 3-clause BSDL'd one, a couple of scripts dedicated to the public domain, and a several patches to existing free software. Nobody sent me to an ivy-league school.
You're going to have to do better than "I might release a GPL'd app someday" if you want to convince the people here that you're the unique snowflake you claim to be. And remember: even if you're brilliant, why should anyone put you through school? What's the payoff for them?
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, to the question: MIT gives full financial aid, based on what they think your parents can afford to pay. Yeah, you might end up paying a bit more a year than a $10,000 a year state school once you get finaid from them, but then again maybe not, and for the education you'll get at MIT and the people you'll meet there, it will be worth it. I go to a school that costs more than MIT and my parents make less than 100k a year (well less), and I got through the first two years of school without loans. This brings up my second point to you: don't look at loans as a bad thing. Look at them as an investment in yourself. If you come out of MIT with an engineering degree, you can easily be making a high five or low six figures straight out of college. You'll pay off your loans in a year or two at that pace. Well worth it.
Personally, I'd suggest looking at not just MIT, too. I was a CS major for my first two years here at my school (oh fuck it, I go to Yale, just so you know, I don't know why we always beat around the bush here), and there is a great, theoretical program. However, I found that while I enjoy programming, computer science is something completely different from programming, and decided to change my major to Linguistics. It's wonderful the large range of possibilities a school like Yale or Stanford or Brown can give to you. Don't confine yourself to a technical school, especially if you already have a lot of technical skills.
Let's see. What other advice besides don't worry about money and try to broaden your horizons? Get an on-campus job, you'd be surprised how well some of them pay (I get $13.50 an hour to fix computers and sit at shifts doing homework and helping folks who need it if they ask), get loans, go to a school that gives good financial aid, and you'll graduate, get a great job, and not have to worry about the pittance in loans you have. Go abroad, go to lectures, take advantage of any alumni networks you can get on, especially if they're related to a group or club you are in, just take advantage of the resources your university offers you as much as you can. And even if you don't end up going to a top-tier school, all this will still hold true.
Best of luck. If you want to talk to me at all, feel free to PM me.
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
sure, money isn't EVERYTHING, but it's about 90% of it. when your all grown up and have a house and other responsibilites like a family, you'll learn you'd happily shovel shit for a living if it paid the right money.
and call me jaded, but even in my day critical thinking was dead in college.
i'd also like to point out that "you can easily be making a high five or low six figures straight out of college" is bullcrap and won't happen. you'll have to go into a graduate program after getting your engineering degree, where they will teach you how things are really done and pay you shit money for the pleasure.
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Informative)
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia. Sure, 2 years of Business school might be required after 5 or so years in the work force in order to get a managerial position that really pays bank, but that's far in the future. Places like MS and Google and Yahoo! are hiring kids out of my school at 75k or more a year for software engineering jobs (there is obviously a variance, and some jobs get a lower salary).
Finally, I'm sorry critical thinking was dead at your college, but that is not the case here, and does not seem to be the case at many of the colleges my friends go to. Quite honestly, that seems to be one of the largest differences between some of the "better" schools and some of the lesser-known schools, which is just a sense I get from talking to my few high school friends who went to Ivy or equivalent schools and comparing our experiences to those who went elsewhere. It's not to say that they're not getting good educations, but that level of critical thinking, especially outside of classes, largely seems to be lacking, making some of them really unhappy.
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny. That's really funny. Google (who you mention below) has a minimum of a BS in computer science, but recommends a MS and a Ph.D. is a big plus. I would wager that you really don't know what you're talking about here.
Sure, 2 years of Business school might be required after 5 or so years in the work force in order to get a managerial position that really pays bank, but that's far in the future. Places like MS and Google and Yahoo! are hiring kids out of my school at 75k or more a year for software engineering jobs (there is obviously a variance, and some jobs get a lower salary).
Try "pretty much all jobs have a lower salary." Expecting 75K+ straight out of college is ludicrous unless you have some sort of proven track record that shows you aren't just another college graduate. For someone leaving school with a master's, I'd buy 75K+ (but that'd still be a huge stretch). Same for a Ph.D. Not some kid with a bachelor's.
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok
If you're smart, you're smart and don't need college full time. If you're not, the college degree gets you past the HR screener to someone that can figure out whether or you have some skills they might be interested in.
I'm also fucking tired of college kids trying to justify their waste of money by saying 'we are well rounded' or 'we learned critical thinking'. No one gives a crap about that. Can you write code with any degree of skill?? That's all I care about.
To all the CS majors out there, I need someone that can take an 8 year old program that no one has touched in years and the original author is gone, find all the missing header files, get it compiled and fixed. Today. Not next week, today. You don't get to work on the fun stuff the day you start working. Get over it. I need someone with debugging skills and the humbleness to listen when I tell them 'you really don't want to code it that way' and present a more maintainable and stable alternative. Not some crap your college professor thinks works. I'll give you an opportunity to explain why you want to do it, but the end result is I have 20 other developers and I need all the programs to be maintainable, not some creative crap.
To all the high school kids out there
All that said
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/ [disciplined-minds.com]
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm [chomsky.info]
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story.
The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm [aol.com]
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html [stayfreemagazine.org]
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."
Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 [amazon.com]
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf [grossmont.edu]
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."
And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis [transhumanist.com]
Re:trust me don't do it. (Score:5, Informative)
Beyond that, there is something to be said for a formal education. I was "self taught" in high school also, and thought that I would be able to handle any problem. I couldn't have been more wrong, and in my senior year of high school, when I began taking real CS courses, I learned things that I would never have grasped without a teacher. The sort of things I am studying now can't be "self taught," because in at least one case I am learning it directly from the researcher who made the discovery. Overall, a formal education not only provided me with new ways of thinking about my majors and related fields, but it also broadened my ability to solve problems, both in terms of scope and approach.
Going directly into trade after high school is a waste of time and of talent. Is college expensive? Unfortunately, yes. Is it worth the expense? Absolutely.
Re:Join the Army (Score:5, Insightful)
It's great that you are so aware of all the help Canada has been giving you in Afghanistan. It may come as a surprise that they have been shooting at our soldiers [www.cbc.ca] too. I'm so glad their sacrifices are appreciated by our southern ally.
Re:Join the Army (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Join the Army (Score:5, Informative)
Listen, I don't love the military in any sense, but as a practical choice, it's not as bad as many folks make it out to be. Someone with an engineering degree isn't simply a "warm body" to the military, especially if they're coming straight into the military from college rather than having gone through college after the military in order to become an officer. There are different career paths within the military, especially Navy, that can lead to many different places, and that pay incredibly well.
Re:A Few Clarifications (Score:5, Insightful)
I know two or three people offhand who funded their entire education through scholarships they applied to outside of their educational institute's financial aid office. It's very doable.
4. I'm not saying that I haven't considered public schools; I simply much prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores. If that sounds arrogant I apologize, but I'm just tired of going to schools like my high school that don't have a *single* person (student or otherwise) who knows C.
Oh, please. Don't be a fucking douchebag if you can at all help it. "Wah, wah, I am so smart!" You will find people at any institution who will kick your ass up and down the road and know much, much, much more than you do about what you proclaim to be good at; you will find people who are far hotter shit than you are or ever will be. It doesn't matter where you go, this will be the case.
"Oh, no, nobody in my high school knows C! I am adrift in a sea of stupidity!" Grow up.
5. I want to go to MIT because I think that I can learn something about programming from other students and teachers (the computer programming class is taught with JavaScript and teachers certified by a one day course) for the first time in my life.
You can do that at any university. Hell, MIT's learning materials are given away for free. Do you want to learn, or do you want the little piece of paper?
7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article.
Your mother is a moron, and you shouldn't be listening to her when it comes to this.
8. I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause.
"Work" is the exchange of your time for their money, and if they want you to fuck up a Holy Sacred GPL Project because it suits your purposes, you do it or you get fired. You need a cluestick to the head or need to learn about the real world. It's not a cause, it's an operating system and a style of releasing software.
9. I hate to respond to my own article, but I felt like I needed to clear up a few things.
Frankly, you just make yourself look like more of an ass. You're in plentiful, if not good, company, though--you sound like half the kids in my school's CS department.
Re:TAG: youarenotanuniquesnowflake (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't you just answer his question instead of spouting off about how much better your way of doing things is? What, you don't have an answer to his question because instead of going to a good school you fucked around with a "Berufsmatur" instead? Well then shut the fuck up.
Re:Skillset... (Score:5, Funny)
O how sweet.