The thing I regret the most for my career…

After school, I went to a big IT company and started my creaer as a software engineer. and be working there since. It has been 6 years and a half until now.

During these years, as any other software engineers, I worked hard and tried my best to code a better my career out. Jump to one project, finished it and move on to another. During these, I am a little surprised to realize that the following idea is the thing I regret the most, more than anything else for my career:

I regret that I was not studying with my full effort in my college days.

When I was a little boy, my brother, who is nine years older than me, came back from the college and said to me: “Apply yourself in college, it is a gift for all of us, take it. ” As a ten year old who only thought about playing and eating, of course I ignored the advice.

When I went to college myself, the teachers said the same thing to me. Sadly, I still not took it seriously. During the years in college, I simply thought most the things school taught is “useless”. I stilled go to classes, did my homework and passed all the tests, because I had to get my degree. But the problem is, I didn’t get the idea WHY the classes are important.

But come to think of it, it can be understood why I thought so. The classes in school was isolated from real work. In the morning I learned C programming language, In the afternoon I jumped to learned calculus. But I never known why I needed to learn them, and what good about them. I did’t know that are super useful in my work later, because I had no working experience. But the truth is, I have to learn them and learn them well to get a job and have the working experience. That’s the paradox.

So now, all I have is regret. These years, I tried my best to learning during work, after work, before work, to make up the loss in my college. But it much, much inefficent then college. I simply don’t have the big truck of continouse time to dedicated myself to one technical area and go deep into it. This is really a sad thing when I think of that. If I ever see myself in ten years ago, one of the most important things I told him will be this:

“Please, don’t be rebellious or stupid, all the things they teach here, they are gold. Please listen to your older brother and your teachers, and study, not for your degree this time, but for not regretting in the future!”