Dan LuuI'm probably unreasonably holding a (mild) grudge here, but every time I get a spam email from Wisconsin Engineering asking for donations (no matter how many times I mark these emails as "unsubscribe and report spam", they somehow manage to keep singing me up for more lists that evade Gmail's spam filter), I think about the year of my life they made me waste to fulfill a bunch of pointless requirements and don't really feel compelled to donate.
I ignored prereqs and took interesting classes in math and computer engineering for two years. I then went to the departments to see if they'd let me graduate without taking intro classes (I'd fulfilled the advanced class requirements). Math had no problem with this but Eng made me take classes like e-mag I even though I'd already taken a grad-level courses that use e-mag, like diode lasers and VLSI CAD interconnect. They also made me take calc II despite having taken grad level math classes.
I guess one could argue that this was a valuable learning experience, in that it was my first adult encounter with pointless bureaucratic requirements, but I don't think that spending a year of my life taking intro courses when I'd already taken grad-level courses could possibly be viewed as worth it overall.
With all the time I had from not going to class and not studying, I got back into the serious competitive video game scene, which was fun, but ultimately pointless and a poor use of time.
I was also just two years out from growing up in a household that spent so little money that I was regularly lightheaded from hunger because I was actively starving, so pushing back graduation and FTE eng earnings for a year was quite terrible for me.
I'm sure there's a way I could've asked to get the bureaucrats to approve my request and, with my current knowledge of middle-class manners and mannerisms, I think I now know how to get such requests approved but, IMO that only makes it worse!
Abdur Raheem Ali@danluu how do you get such requests approved?
Morgan Gangwere@danluu what's your take on the speedrunning scene?
kccqzy@danluu In my freshman year in college, I didn't even know that was a thing! The fact that you could ignore prereqs and just take classes you wanted to. I ended up deciding to accelerate my life by taking more classes than usual, but all were intro.
In my sophomore year I found that I could ignore prereqs. I was slightly mad.
I still think the people running the freshman orientation tend to way underestimate the abilities of the incoming class.
Matt Palmer
Jay Daigle@danluu A major contributor to me majoring in math and not economics is that the math department was great about letting me move ahead, and the econ department was not. So I took advanced econ coursework, but never took like intermediate micro or anything, and didn't wind up with a minor.
(There are definitely requirements that would have been useful to take in there, too, but I didn't want to deal with them if I had to go through too many intro courses I already knew.)