Gregory Baranski

Introduction

This whole post is based on my personal experiences in Polish education system, after going through traditional primary school, high school and university.

This also explains why I dropped out of university just after a few weeks.

Pre-university

I was a very naughty student with a lot of problems with my behavior, talking during classes, doing some “fun” stuff with my other friends. That brought me to the principal and school psychologist many times. Nevertheless nothing could help, my behavior at school didn’t fix at all.

In the meantime, in the 7th grade I started with my 1st business

But all of the sudden I got referred to an adolescent psychological counseling center. In the result there was a section directed to the teachers that they had to be acknowledged with, and there you could find a phrase “develop the student’s interests”.

This paper was with me throughout my whole pre-university education, and guess what? Not only they didn’t help me in any way to develop my interests, but they often questioned my interests and hobbies.

Many times I asked for help from them, either it was with signing up for a contest that required an action from my school, or just a casual ask for help if there’s anyone that could help me with answering some questions about electronics, as at that time I was developing an IoT platform with microcontrollers and a lot of electronics.

Even though my high school was primarily about the topic of mechatronics, and we had course of electronics. All they managed to do is to turn me down, trying to align me with the rest of students, not going beyond the curriculum.

After 3 years into going to this mechatronics high school I transferred to different high school, and it just resulted in making me independent from any of these people, relying just on myself - is that good? I don’t know, but I’m glad that there’s some solution.

University

Warsaw University of Technology is among the best universities in Poland, so It thought - I’ll have a good community there, with ambitious people and helpful professors. Soon I realized after going to my professor that teaches programming and computer science and asking him if there’s anyone that could answer me a few basic questions about my the AI technology used in wheretopark.app, his response could be summarized into “I don’t know, look up on the website and ask maybe someone will be eager to help”.

Well maybe I had too big expectations, but what I would expect from a university worker is to support any students that are trying to go ahead the curriculum, and develop more than just what is required.

I don’t want to rely just on my experiences, thus I started observing other people and how they think and treat the university.

From my observations most students can do only what they’re told to do, and they won’t go anywhere beyond that. If you were to tell them to handwrite “Hello World” 100 times on a sheet of paper, I’m pretty sure most of them would do that.

Summary

Nevertheless I see positives of this, it required me to work harder, and just not care about others and to not expect any help from anyone. This is good to some extend - just think how many talents were wasted because of how the education system works?

Life is like high school. by Derek Sivers