Re: I want to contribute and chose right project for graduate thesis

[Emanuel Berg]

Ken Goldman wrote:

> My 2 cents.
>
> Learning how to deal with huge egos and
> understanding the culture of open source
> projects is valuable - certainly not a waste
> of time for a new engineer.

Well, yeah. Actually it is not the huge egos
that is the problem. What I menat was - some
time one these lists and groups people have an
attitude to newcomers that isn't good, either
they are reluctant to give good answers, like
they answer in very short sentences, *or* they
do the opposite, write several pages with
details which the newcomer won't understand
much of, and then they start speaking among
themselves and the newcomer obviously doesn't
feel encouraged to proceed with the project.

> I don't know whether it's thesis-worthy.

Right. Like most other things it is better to
learn that along the way. Many educations work
like that way by the way. Like CS. They don't
teach programming, at least not here they
don't. It is just something you are expected to
pick up while doing AI, databases, interfaces,
and what have you...

And it makes sense! Universities should be
theory and practice that is oriented to the
theory, not to the practice itself.
Because practice is much easier, many, many
people can do it and certainly anyone who has
been thru "3" or "5 years" of all that theory
and theory-practice. (I put the years within
quotation marks because no one ever comples
their education in time. Not because being
lazy, mind you. If anyone would ever do that,
people would ask, "hey, what is wrong with this
dude?!")

But when you are stuck in all that theory it
sure is a lot of frustration :)

"Why can't we just work on it?" :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573