I think you might be going to the wrong university if they hand out their degrees on shiny paper

Anyway, it varies wildly course to course. For example, my uni is the best in the country for my chosen course, but other unis might be better for other stuff outside my field on interest.

Pretty much this.

omg vometia I know that name

In Canada it really doesn't matter that much but I've hard in the states it does.

Its strange, because everyone here does think it matters, so a lot of people go, but they dont know what they want to be so they take classes that wont really help them. Its getting harder and harder to get into a college (at least here in Ca) and more and more grads are finding that their degrees arent going to help much.

I would hope not, seeing as I was planning to take online game design courses from UAT. I don't really feel that that is aiming for the clouds, it just goes with the fact that it is what I really want to do for a career. That paired with creative writing classes I will be taking at community college, isn't really top-tier schooling if you ask me.

I think you can utilize that type of schooling. youre not getting a degree in Anasazi history or something.

That would've been rather awesome.

Maybe they do that at the Naval Academy...

The sad / funny thing is I haven't even taken my degree out of the envelope they sent it to me in.

That's totally true. I would never recommend the University of Michigan if you want to take, say, Animal Husbandry. That's what Michigan State is for.

What your getting a degree in is alot more important then where in most cases. That's with the exception of the top schools in the country, if you have a degree from Harvard or Princeton that will look alot better then a degree from say West Virginia University.
Also a certain degrees match up better with certain colleges. Like a medical degree from John Hopkins.

Speaking from a UK perspective, yes and no, depending on who you talk to.

If you have an Oxford or Cambridge Degree, there are employers that view a "bad" oxbridge degree as good as a good degree elsewhere, there are other places where as long as its a respectible university it doesn't matter where it was.

My advice would be to look at where the movers and shakers in your chosen profession got their education, and where your potential employers got theirs. Do the same universities and colleges come up a lot? If so, try and get into those institutions if only so you and your eventual interviewer/employer have something in common to talk about; it can't hurt!

However make sure you remember a degree isn't enough these day. Get volunteer/Summer job experience in your chosen profession, and look for other steps you can take to get ahead of the pack.

This might be my jaded opinion, but I find many others affirm it to be true....

Where you go to school is somewhat important...depending on what you are going to school for.

Example...MBA degrees are largely worthless unless it is from an Ivy League school. If you're already working in a capacity where an MBA will open doors for you, any MBA should do fine. If you're eyeballing those six-figure salaries from graduation day...it won't happen. It's as much a "just us" club as you can get. An MBA from any accredited school will get you in at low-end firms, but they are largely not respected from the high-power employers.

Outside your geographical area, your school has little to no marketing value in employment.

Undergraduate or graduate, the locals know your school and its reputation. Outside of your area (surrounding states included), if nobody's heard of your school, your degree will not stand out. They don't call it "pedigree" for nothing. Not that this is a "bad" thing, but the higher cost people pay for attending a well-known name brand university or college is there for a reason. I've seen people from unknown schools be smarter than those from respected schools, but in the end, it's that pedigree that got them in the door. Again...the "just us" club in operation.

Social connections are 10 times more important than good grades.

Sad to say, you can be a straight A student and be unemployable. America is beset with the malady of "popularity syndrome." If you were a loner but brilliant, your only hope of a good job is if someone needs "the best" for the job, and while all employers say they want "the best" or at least "reliable, hard working people," the fact is that most employers hire the most likable and socially compatible candidates for the job, not the best equipped.

Don't neglect your grades, but remember you better be working on being socially active with clubs, fraternities/sororities, and getting in good with 2 or more professors with the ability to help you get opportunities after graduation. If you lack good social skills, devote a lot of time to learning them because without them, your education won't take you very far. Along these lines, be sure you go to a school with social/political views you can generally tolerate. If your teachers are a bunch of wing nuts you can never agree with, odds are you might gain their respect, but never their support. The boot lickers who love to eat up what the professor holds sacred will get the recommendation for job placement over you most every time.

That's the problem with differentiating between actual skill and grades. In my clinical lab class, you can get an A on paper but actually doing things like drawing blood, preparing blood smears, conducting differential counts, ect will be extremely hard for some.

I guess a qualification as to be made as to what is meant by "matter".

I can't speak for other countries, but in the US, it does matter, in many different levels, some levels more than others.
For example: a law student going to Georgetown or Berkeley will have a wider choice of top tier internships than someone going to, say, University of Colorado Law School, just because of the schools' rankings and reputation. That law student from Georgetown or Berkeley will have a much better chance to get his resume picked up and aligning an interview when applying for a job.

There is also the sorority and fraternity links...

Or simply school pride... ask anyone from U. of Florida. They go to their graves whimpering "Go Gators!".

But once you have gained experience in a specific field, all things equal, the experience matters more.

And then there are the fields like mine, where you try to "minimize" your qualifications when you go to the tech interview. You start throwing around you academic qualifications in the tech interview, you are sure to fail it

Wow. Which field if you don't mind me asking?

Look at it like this if Lawyer A went to Harvard and Lawyer B went to a local state college who would you choose?

Indeed, not me luckily.

:rofl:

Unix engineering, but also unix Systems Administrator, especially if you are dealing with Solaris or AIX.
It goes back to the way Sun and IBM certifications work. I am not very familiar with the IBM certification for AIX, but the one for Solaris, while covering the OS in length, it doesn't cover other things you normally encounter out there in the real world, like clusters, or SAN, etc.

The thing is, just about everything in the OS, you can find instructions on how to use it within the OS built-in manual; matter of fact, responding "I don't quite remember that command, I would need to look at the man page to give you the correct answer" is a very valid response in a technical interview. You don't want to ay that off the bat, obviously, and not a number of times either...

There are also a few things the certification covers extensively, but you rarely see in the real world, like user management. Most large companies use a 3rd party application for user management.

When I have gone to tech interviews and the interviewer started the interview with "so, says here you are certified" and he's not looking at me, my standard response goes like "well, yeah, you know, I have to have something in there to get the hiring manager to pick my resume from the pile.." chuckles ensue, then we're good

That reminds me of a time I met someone who really didn't get it. I was once asked in an interview, "so you're familiar with such-and-such manual?" and he started flicking through it: "What's the third word on the sixth line of page 97?" He was actually being serious. I was so astonished by his PHB-like demeanour that I had no idea what to say. Well, other than "I have absolutely no idea." :facepalm:

I didn't get the job. I'd be interested to see who did get it; or, indeed, if anyone was actually prepared to work for the idiot in question.

Yeah, I have had something similar happen to me once... when the dude asked me the question, I first was trying to figure out if he wanted to see if I tried to BS him, or he just wanted an excuse to fail me.

And I have been the technical interviewer as well
The first question I pose, I take a piece of paper, and write something simple like:
for x in $(cat file1.txt); do
y=$(grep ${x} file2.txt)
echo ${x} ${y}
done
Then hand the piece of paper to the interviewee, and I ask: "describe the 13 steps the korn shell goes through in executing this command", which is really a trick question, but sets the tone for the rest of the interview, as it tells whether you know your stuff, or you are trying to BS me.

The hardest interview I ever had, I am not going to say with whom, but I was in front of a panel of 8 people.. one of the guys handed me a marker, pointed me to the whiteboard, and asked:
"I want to set up an application with a database to serve 10 million online customers nationwide. The application and database need to be up 24x7x365."
I asked the dude: "how many days did you schedule this interview for?" They weren't amused, and it just went downhill from there..

The worst "technical" interview I ever had, started with "so, do you really like Unix?" and ended up with one of the interviewers falling asleep on a chair..

Indeed, In Canada for some reason (and canada alone) there are a lot of impassioned voices on the internet (like Redflagdeals) about going to the worst Universities so you can get inflated grades and get an easy ticket to Harvard. But for some reason the vast majority of the applicants accepted into grad schools of all tiers got their undergraduate education from the better schools. I guess the letter of the law doesn't apply here, grad schools are smart enough to know that. (duh)

For Phd holders it's the same, if some one has a doctorate from a bad state college, then they shouldn't expect to get a tenure at Harvard.

But ultimately talent is the most important, just look at all of the students accepted into top grad schools without undergraduate degrees.

Is this sarcasm?

I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting into graduate school, let alone a top graduate school, without an undergraduate degree. Please feel free to prove me wrong, but I don't think it happens that often, if at all.

No, at my school every year there are a couple of people accepted into medschool without an undergrad degree (last year there were 2 I think). On top of that a handful whose grades were below the cutoff.

If you completed your PHd at Umich, then surely you have heard of these cases?


Noel Ignatiev got into harvard as a masters student without an undergrad degree, harvard is even more prestigious than my school. (a lot more prestigious)

What do these people do to warrant that? It makes no sense.

I did my undergrad at UMich. I'm still working on my Ph.D.

And the Psychology Ph.D program at UMich (which I am not in) accepts around 2-4 students into the program. I have never heard of anyone getting accepted into any Ph.D program without first obtaining an undergraduate degree.

I think it is complete and utter crap that someone can get into a Ph.D / medschool program without an undergraduate degree. It is basically telling those people who spent 4-5 years getting their undergraduate degree that, hey, all that work you did is essentially worthless if we'll just let some smart guy into our Ph.D program - so what if he didn't do the work.

Which group?

For the first group, no idea as that info is confidential. They only publish the statistics every year (which is how I found out). I'm not a med student and I'm not interested to investigate, so I don't know any insider info.

They can be people with connections or actually supremely talented people. I doubt there's much middle ground.