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I just took an online survey of USC gradutating seniors conducted by the Student Affairs divison. Here are my answers to two of the open-ended questions. I edited the second one slightly where I talked about my job prospects.

1. How could your student service needs have been better satisfied?

The need for a comprehensive guide to campus activites and events continues. MySNAPP was (and still is!) a financially corrupt and technologically floundering failure, and we have yet to see the fruits of the Portal project. As a stopgap measure, MyUSC is better than nothing, but it is less of an information center and more of a one-login portal to other online services. Most students have no real need for this, although it’s nice to have. In my mind, the lack of results in this area is one of the largest problems in student services.

2. Other than your service needs, how could USC have made your undergraduate experience better?

In general, across the academic spectrum, I felt that classes at USC helped me very little in preparing for the world ahead. Ostensibly, the purpose of college is to prepare a student for the rest of his life — intellectually, emotionally, professionally, etc.

But when I think about these different areas of my life, I can’t help but decide that the bolstering of my preparedness for what lies ahead just happened to occur while I was attending USC, and not as a direct result of my choice to come here.

You could argue that in this way, USC succeeded by creating an environment in which I was able to “grow up” on my own. However, the core of a university is its academic program, and it’s so difficult for me to draw correlations between my (often quite challenging!) program and the actually-useful skills I’ve accumulated over the last four years that I’m forced to admit that with only four or five exceptions, I would have been better off not enrolling for classes. In this way, absurd as it sounds, I would have had more time to actually learn important things.

It may be that this problem is specific to my degree (Computer Science), but I am also a music performance minor, and took courses toward a double-major in Neuroscience for three semesters. The symptoms I’m describing were common to all these programs, as well as the GE and Writing systems.

It is commonly argued that is this a problem of the balance between “academic, theoretical” studies on one hand and “professional, applicable” concerns on the other. With the exception of the honors physics and calculus I completed, my courses at USC provided neither. More usually, my classes preached theoretical knowledge so basic or arcane that it couldn’t be considered “higher education,” or we considered practical knowledge so outdated that it couldn’t possibly be considered relevant in 2005. In some cases, not even 1995.

In the end, I’m disenchanted with the academic experience and the tradition of university education in general. I’m burned out from working 80-hour weeks. [snip]

I have a lot more to say about this, and I would love to help make the USC experience better for future graduates. I mean for my criticism to be constructive. If you think what I’ve said is interesting, or you’d like some specific examples of problems, feel free to contact me.

For now, I have to go work on my compilers project for CSCI 410.