A curriculum of guilt

Graduation is less than a month and just two exams away. I look forward to getting my diploma, but more so all the books I'll get the relief to read. That might sound like a paradox: ending education by reading more books? The problem is that while most courses are interesting, they're often not the most interesting thing I could do with my time at a given point in time.

So I stop reading and start doing something else. Plenty of projects to fill a day. Now books are almost banned. If I pick up another book, I'll immediately be smitten by guilt. How can I defend reading off-course material if I haven't even read the curriculum yet?

Hence, the reading slows down tremendously or even stops. Only to pick up at a frantic pace in preparation for the exams. That's really not a healthy way to nurture your love for reading. Which is my I'm really looking forward to get the guilt off my back and to hold books that actually would be the most interesting thing I could do with my time.

I even jumped the celebration and ordered a huge stack from Amazon: Smalltalk: Best Practice Patterns, General Principles of Systems Design, Managing Expectations, all four volumes of Quality Software Management, and a few others. (Yearh, Jerry Weinberg is a favorite author of mine.)

Can't wait to get started.