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I feel dumb academically despite getting straight As.

I got average GCSEs (5 Bs, 5Cs and 1 D) which looking back on I could have maybe done better if I had better revising techniques. I attended sixth form but dropped out before completing the first year due to family issues, stress and moving across the country, my grades in practice exams weren't the best and usually C's or Ds. Fast forward a year and I went back to college and passed with a distinction*. I'm now at uni studying software engineering and I've been getting As in everything but I still feel like I'm dumb, most of my course has been coursework so far and only 1 exam. I don't even feel like I've learnt much to be honest.
Original post by Days_H
I got average GCSEs (5 Bs, 5Cs and 1 D) which looking back on I could have maybe done better if I had better revising techniques. I attended sixth form but dropped out before completing the first year due to family issues, stress and moving across the country, my grades in practice exams weren't the best and usually C's or Ds. Fast forward a year and I went back to college and passed with a distinction*. I'm now at uni studying software engineering and I've been getting As in everything but I still feel like I'm dumb, most of my course has been coursework so far and only 1 exam. I don't even feel like I've learnt much to be honest.

Same mate.
You're probably correct - software engineering is easy :tongue: A's for everyone \o/
Reply 3
Avatar for gjd800
gjd800
20
I feel dim as a matter of routine, and I have a doctorate!
Reply 4
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kkboyk
21
Original post by Days_H
I got average GCSEs (5 Bs, 5Cs and 1 D) which looking back on I could have maybe done better if I had better revising techniques. I attended sixth form but dropped out before completing the first year due to family issues, stress and moving across the country, my grades in practice exams weren't the best and usually C's or Ds. Fast forward a year and I went back to college and passed with a distinction*. I'm now at uni studying software engineering and I've been getting As in everything but I still feel like I'm dumb, most of my course has been coursework so far and only 1 exam. I don't even feel like I've learnt much to be honest.


Have you thought of going far and beyond to test your knowledge? For example, doing your own projects and solving much harder problems.
Original post by Days_H
I got average GCSEs (5 Bs, 5Cs and 1 D) which looking back on I could have maybe done better if I had better revising techniques. I attended sixth form but dropped out before completing the first year due to family issues, stress and moving across the country, my grades in practice exams weren't the best and usually C's or Ds. Fast forward a year and I went back to college and passed with a distinction*. I'm now at uni studying software engineering and I've been getting As in everything but I still feel like I'm dumb, most of my course has been coursework so far and only 1 exam. I don't even feel like I've learnt much to be honest.

Software engineering courses tend to be vocational, so the course should be stretching you in different ways compared with an academic subject - those courses are normally focused more on practical hands-on skills rather than theory. i.e. you don't need a strong academic/theory/maths background for software engineering or indeed most other technical IT careers, but having first-hand experience in actually using the languages and technologies to build software and solve problems is important; hence the focus on coursework rather than exams.

I'd expect a greater raw workload and needing to spend long hours on project work since hands-on-skills like programming really takes hundreds of hours of practice writing code and solving problems to become competent and confident. You need time to learn the principles and practices, equipping yourself with 'building blocks', techniques and patterns which can be applied to different problems.

I'm guessing your intention is to get into that kind of work later on? If you're finding the course isn't challenging you then set yourself the challenge of working on a decent, large, non-trivial project that pushes you to learn techniques and technologies. (Maybe pick up a popular web/app framework for whichever language you're most comfortable with - there should be loads of free online tutorials, examples and courses for that kind of thing)

A few ideas of the kinds of things which are really useful and important to know when you eventually go looking for work in Software engineering jobs:
- Confident, competent programmer in a popular general-purpose language like Java/C#/C++/Python/etc, including a decent understanding of how the language works under-the-hood and a lot of the capabilities of its built-in libraries
- Being able to diagnose and troubleshoot buggy/broken software and get to the root cause (whether that's code, data, configuration, O/S, user error, etc.)
- Able to write high quality code to reduce the risk that it ever ends up buggy or broken in the first place.
- Automated testing; particularly writing unit tests and the principles behind "test-driven development".
- Being able to build RESTful 'Web' APIs using a back-end web framework, then being able to use/consume those APIs over HTTP
- Understanding software design principles such as "GRASP" or "SOLID". and concepts like abstraction or separation of concerns.
- Familiarity with widely-used software design patterns such as 'Model-View-Controller' or 'Repository'.
- Confident in using tools like 'Git' (source control -e.g GitHub), and also knowing your way around an IDE/debugger
- Firm grasp on the jargon and programming terminology which is buzzing around; able to understand the terminology often found in a lot of typical Developer/SDK docs
- Relational database design and modelling skills as well as SQL.
- Able to confidently navigate Google and StackOverflow to dig deep enough and find information when something's not working.
- Knowing how to structure a large non-trivial project and separate it into logically distinct modules/packages so that it's not a 'big ball of mud'.
- Any "devops" or O/S skills you can pick up are also nice-to-have. Cloud skills are nice-to-have too.

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