> Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.
I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor.
It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier.
EDIT:
Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.
> I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email.
True story: When I was in college, a girl came to me with a question: If she put Borland C++ on her laptop, could she compile programs on it just as easily as on her desktop? I replied that I don't see why not.
Then she asked: "But isn't there a chip in my desktop that does the compiling? Does my laptop have one, too?"
This was a CS major. And an A student. At a technical university.
I feel your pain, man.
And yes, for undergrad education, community or even state college may be more suitable to your interests. A hard-learned lesson for me. The goal of Ivy League undergrad, it seems, is to mold you into a "certain kind of man". "Harvard men", for instance, look and behave a certain way, and know and say the right things. So that when the Harvard men at the helm of power see you, they recognize you as "one of their own" and "good people".
Some of us already have some idea what sort of person we are, and don't want to become anything else. The good news is, we can get all the education we need for pretty cheap, even in the USA. The bad news is, Google is looking for "Stanford men"...
(I should have replied, "Yes, it's called the CPU. And yes, every computer has one.")
I was helping a math undergrad (senior, graduating with honors) from a top 50 university study for the actuarial exam. They were stuck on a question that amounted to "what's the volume of this circular cylinder?"
As I walked them through that, it dawned on me that the problem wasn't recalling or applying the formula, but that they had no idea what x = cos theta, y = sin theta, theta ranges 0 to 2*pi, z ranges 0 to 2 would graph. No idea and no idea how to even begin...
I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor.
It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier.
EDIT: Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.