It wasn't so much the water or the bland color palette, for me. The literal smell of shit that envelopes the place when the wind blows in juuuuuust the right direction is a deal breaker. Such are the penalties of a town rooted in the livestock industry. I put up there for one single night before I knew that I couldn't cope with Lubbock livin'. Online education scares me. The lack of a personal, human connection with your professor just doesn't cement relationships that last long enough to be beneficial. Hell, I only formed a true relationship of mutual respect with one of my upper-level undergraduate coursework professors. None of this is applicable if you're looking to just get certified/qualified/etc. for the next career tier, and I'm not familiar enough with the software industry to know what you want to shoot for, especially with your focus in functional languages. Regardless, much respect, software engineering is a noble pursuit. I can't imagine writing the inner workings of a 3D-CAD software kernel or whatever. Lately, my pathetic attempts to use IDL for relatively simple data processing have humbled me. To functional programming languages I say... "I'm busy that day, sorry".
When I was a freshman, I attended a semester's worth of Calculus 2 (typically series/summation) lectures wherein my professor never ONCE made eye contact with a single member of the students in attendance. His english was also only 80% interpretable, so you were left writing down what you thought were polysyllabic, technical words and then "internet searching" them later, with mixed results. Smartphones were not a thing, and Google had not rose to total dominance yet ('06). Edit: This experience is one unfortunate product of the "tenure track" university model. Long story short, I ended up paying $20 to a third-party tutoring organization with "classrooms" in a strip center mall, where a presumably coked-up "tutor" explained to us exactly what each professor of the attendees would have on their exams, based upon previous known exam samples. One tutor was named "Arf" (no, seriously), and I wrote a poem about him, something titled like "I'm an onomatopoeia!", written from the perspective of a dog, I think. Everything about this paragraph is kind of fucked up, in retrospect. So that's how I got B's in my intro classes. Attending lectures held at/by the actual university were often useless, and you could just cram everything in during one or two nights via a third party. Major downside: you load much of this knowledge into the human analog of RAM, and then the files are mostly deleted after the exam. Only upside was course credit, which, if it wasn't obvious by now, can sometimes mean practically nothing. Still, with higher education (graduate degrees and beyond), this isn't the case, and you're thinking at a high enough level to stimulate neurogenesis or whatever. Instilling a thirst for knowledge or some other purpose can motivate the body to make it through some fucked up shit. Cheers. :)strong accents
I went to the first couple of weeks of my first intro to calculus class, then just stayed home and read the book except on exam days for the rest of that semester and the other 3 classes in the sequence. The guy who taught them was great, but there were a lot of majors that required those classes, including all those offered by the business and finance schools, and so he had to cover the material very, very slowly and I was bored to tears. I found out when I had him for complex analysis years later that he gave graded homework and I probably should have failed his classes, but he had given me credit for it in my absence because he understood. Best professor ever.
That is certainly an optimized story of understanding. It's almost like taking a class from yourself; You know you haven't been to all the lectures, but your mastery of the exams was sufficient enough to elicit an "A". Then confirmed in a more engaging class years later. I've only had a few classes that bored me to tears, and the majority of the rest put me in my place proper. This fall, it's grad school for me, and I cannot WAIT to feel belittled on a regular basis once again.
I'm doing an online CS masters' program. I was in a traditional math PhD program for a few years. I miss hanging with fellow grad students, just because there aren't many opportunities to talk to people who care about the kinds of things you go to graduate school because you care about outside of a university, but I interact with my professors about as much as I did when I was going to physical classes. I don't think it would work as well as it does for anything but computer science, because a good chunk of what you learn in computing you learn from the machine itself -- you don't need nearly as much human feedback for a program as you do for a proof or a paper, but it works pretty well for computer science. About the only complaint I have is that online proctoring services are horrible.