I don’t want to be here any longer. Really. I just want to take a semester or perhaps a whole year off from school and start learning what I want to learn. I don’t feel like anything I am learning from school is going to be any use to me when I get out. I feel that I have gained all the necessary skills that I need to get myself in order. I want to just take a year off. Create a sylabus for myself, and just start learning what I want to learn. There are so many things I want to learn.

- PHP & mySQL
- Python
- Objective-C
- Java
- Open Source Community Involvement

Maybe I dont need to I guess the only fear that I have is not having a mentor. I want to learn all these things but where do I go if I have questions. What if I take all this time off and finally not have anything to do (or make it as a wasted year). I’m scared, and I feel my confidence is keeping me back.

I want to learn things that are relevant for me.

For one thing, I have lost confidence for the School of Information Studies. I attended an Information Session at our school yesterday that talked about Open Source. After the presentation, one of our iSchool highly respected professor asked, “how can we get our students involved in this? I have never been involved in Open Source and I only have been involved in stuff like this from the shareware days”.

Then it hit me. I cant rely on old people to teach a new technologies! My field is continually evolving and to be the best, I have to keep myself on top of the game. I cant rely on professors that think they know it all, but only teach what they interpret of new technology. Screw them.

The things that are most useful to me right now are things that I have learned outside the iSchool! I thought about this again and again and its true. Its the slack time that keeps me on top of my game. When I procrastinate, I dive into things that are interesting to me that make me more knowledgeable in the end. The iSchool teaches theory and hardly and practical useful knowledge.

Its a waste of time and seriously a waste of money. I can just go on:
- Lynda.com ($25/month)
- WROX book database ($50/3 months)
- Peachpit Press Books Online ($42.99/month)

and probably learn a lot more than I can learn through the iSchool. Perhaps even browsing different developer forums and hitting up developer blogs. It just doesnt make sense to pay professors to teach things that are just basics of bigger things. The real world needs real experience, not basic knowledge.

Today I’m breaking out of my mindframe of chasing grades. Grades are just an innacurate mis-representation of knowledge.

So with this, I would like to start this blog about dropping out of Graduate School and trying to defy the conventions of academia towards reaching success.