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Education

When people talk about “education” I often recall a proverb that a surprisingly young* professor of mathematics told us, first year university students. “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.“**

But our professor didn’t end with the proverb. He also said that in the university we will have to study many disciplines, some exciting, some boring – but the main objective always is to teach us how to learn; to learn alone and collaboratively, to learn from academic materials and from experimentation. To learn about things we are passionate about (of course, computers and programming), to learn about their scientific foundation (mathematics, physics), to learn related and not-so-much-related disciplines (chemistry, biology, history, sociology, economics,.. the list goes on), and to learn what and why it’s all about (philosophy, systems theory, cybernetics).

Overall, the professor and his colleagues cared to form researcher’s mentality and engineering attitude in us. And now, looking back over past 15 years, I can say that I’ve managed to meet the objective.

Oh, and finally about my degree.

I hold Master’s in IT; my research and development work was dedicated to application of Artificial Intelligence methods in complex software systems designed for automated analysis and control.

Commentary
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* He was, actually, close to 40s. Considered young for professors.

** Later I got to know that it was saying of Frederic Skinner, one of the greatest psychologists of 20th century, practical scientist, and social philosopher.

 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
This work by Albert Gareev is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.