My University Journey

I graduated in the summer of 2023 with a Master’s in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. My experiences may or may not generalize to other universities. Nevertheless, I have some thoughts.

The Good

University, in some ways, is a magical place. You don’t find many other places with so many people of similar age (and stage of life) who have all declared their interest such a wide variety of fields.

You’ll meet a lot of interesting people at university. A lot of whom will be smarter than you (funny how there’s always someone smarter). Some of these people might even become your friends.

It’s not just the students, a lot of universities also have very smart staff working on very interesting things. You might even find someone who’ll let you work with them on something.

So many people in such a concentrated area can result in some really cool things. I spent the majority of my time competing in a competition called Formula Student. A group of us spent most of our time programming full-size race cars to go around a track completely autonomously. Then we traveled to a competition for it and won. Wild.

Programming race cars not your thing? What about building rockets? There’s a group of students doing that too. What about levitating pods? Humanoid robots? Or the hundreds of other groups doing various things.

University is the best place to do something cool.

The Bad

Your degree. To a certain extent.

Courses can be interesting, and some are good. Some really good. Those are fun. But you often spend a huge amount of time listening to (or sleeping through) mediocre lectures, working on artificially constructed coursework and studying for exams that don’t end up mattering.

These activities take time away from doing cool things. Mostly. Some courses might help you do the cool things. Some might even inspire you to do cool things you didn’t know were possible. Most don’t.

The funny thing is, many universities seem to think the opposite. They think that their courses and degrees are the most important thing. It can range from degrees being so full on, you don’t have time to do much of anything else, to university bureaucracy making it extremely difficult to do anything cool on your own.

The Regrets

When you come from high school where you’re (often) working as hard as you can to get good grades - justifiably so because you want to get into a good university - it can be counter-intuitive not to put everything into your degree. I wish I had realised this earlier. I also wished how precious time is and exploit my summers more wisely.

Focus on doing things that are cool. Exploit your time at university to the fullest extent. Nowhere else do you have the same mix of talent, ideas and time to pull things off. It won’t last forever.