So many resources, don’t be left behind
Hello Everyone!
This is my second blog and builds on the “getting started” theme. My first blog was about something that’s incredibly difficult, starting a business, where today I’m focusing on something that has become so easy we take it for granted even though its changing societal norms. Self-education has become so accessible in some fields that societies requirement for a “Traditional” education may actually be slowing down progress. I’m a mechanical engineer who is really a self-educated software engineer. I went back to school to fill in the gaps I was missing by having a CS degree, but it really wasn’t required because many of those gaps could have been filled by less expensive options.
I have only good things to say about OSU and the Post-Baccalaureate CS program. It was a better program than i even hoped it would be, but the primary reason I pursued the degree was because I didn’t want a lack of CS degree to prevent me from an opportunity in the field i was working in in future, even though i was fully qualified through experience. I’m sure there are many others in the program that felt the same as I did, even though their experience in Industry puts them far beyond anything a degree could provide. They had gaps, and school is helping fill those gaps, but its almost certain those gaps could have been filled with a few less expensive options.
Of course, everyone learns differently and some people do much better in the structured environment that a traditional education provides. With the same breath, others do much better on there own learning the topics that are really relevant to the problems they are trying to solve. Traditional education provides the benefit of being broad, structured and well defined, but it also is pretty far behind Industry even in topics that people perceive academia to be the leading edge. This brings me back to the purpose of this article, which is the importance of understanding how to use the incredible resources we have available for self-education. I can spend another couple years in school so i can take a few classes on sound theory and convolutional neural networks, or I can get online and walk though an online tutorial that shows me how to process audio into images and build a deep neural network that does audio classification in a similar way as any of my favorite speech recognition devices do.
I had a lot of fun with these:
https://mikesmales.medium.com/sound-classification-using-deep-learning-8bc2aa1990b7
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/deep-learning-audio-classification-fcbed546a2dd
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