There are some habits I learned from my academic curriculum. Some of them are good, some of them are not at all. During the programming courses we took, we never had an emphasis on tests, our code structure and software architecture was never a criterion for evaluating our homework/exams (It was always the UI that mattered if you impress the teacher quite enough you will get an excellent grade. Which I find sad)

We did some practices just for the sake of doing them, like using pull requests even in a 1-person project. (and I continued doing that during my first years of professional life because It was depicted to me that it’s the way to go…)

We may say that some things are very specific and can’t be taught in university material, I completely agree, but I was on a Software engineering path and some things are crucial to understanding.

Some courses were interesting from the title, but it was merely listing the content and never teaching the motivation and the trade-offs. And we had technology-oriented courses, like learning JAVA. I have nothing against Java, but the course entitled OOP.

I had the impression that we were being told what to do and how to do it but rarely the motivations and the thought work behind it, which with time I found that it’s the most important thing because of its portability and what we really need before starting to do.

All this to say, it’s important to review the academic paths. Because that’s the fundamentals that fresh graduates will lean on during their first years. And to make it easier for mentors who are already in the industry. They should be guiding instead of breaking and rebuilding.