I just graduated from university. I now have a B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Philosophy from Arizona State University. (In other words, I've achieved my bullshit math degree.) Since I started community college in Spring 2020, it's now been a full 6 and a half years and I will soon have the piece of paper, whenever they get around to mailing it to me. I didn't go to convocation and I didn't have any sort of celebration short of eating some nice chili with my fiance after taking finals.
Was it worth it? Who's to say. I haven't yet done any serious looking for a new job, but intellectually, it was hit or miss. On the one hand, it was good having a set curriculum of stuff to do and things to read to walk me through the basics of different fields. But I feel like the undergraduate mathematics degree was very much a cursory glance at each field. I mean, the fact that semesters are only 16 weeks and you're taking four different classes usually of completely different subjects and each one has to have low requirements so people will be able to take them... that whole thing is just a mess. I don't really blame ASU for following the standard formula, I more blame the educational system as a whole for thinking that this kind of rigorous and taxing schedule is a good idea for students. So, the way my degree worked out, I took a bunch of discrete math classes (things like number theory, group theory, some ring theory, combinatorics, cryptography, ...), and all these classes required the same basic proofs class and nothing else, and so I ended up learning a lot of the same material over and over again. That wasn't super great. So by the sixth time I've learned about the division algorithm over the integers, I'm just so over it and I'm learning absolutely nothing.
When I did learn new things though it was great and the lectures were very good, but everything felt so detached for me. Like the people there weren't really there and I'm just a string on a spreadsheet to the professors. Of course, physically a lot of the people I met actually weren't there, since people came from all over Arizona including myself to go to ASU, and a lot of people just didn't show up to classes. But it never really seemed to me like there was much room for me to expand to with my particular interests.
My main focus while I've been in college and university has always been formal logic, metaproofs, and computer-aided proof simulation. But I was never offered any opportunities for me to use that focus. One of my philosophy professors (my favorite one) straight up told me I should go to the Netherlands and do a graduate degree in logic directly over there, but that's just unfeasible for me in my current place in life and financial situation.
On the side while I was doing my degree, what I actually love, what I can do for hours and days and weeks on end, is work with computers. My favorite part of my math degree in some sense was typing my proofs for my homework or personal study directly in LaTeX in Neovim because I got to put my Linux machines to work doing what they're best at. I took part one of a two part course on Linux in community college (which kind of sucked because it was all online on some terrible fake virtual machine), and I took two programming classes that I could just sleepwalk my way through even as a freshman, and that was it for the crossover between computers and my degree. So now I'm in a position where I feel like I want to market myself in the systems administration or programming field but I have a math degree, which seems odd. But I know I'm qualified for those jobs, so I'm hopeful I can work an angle and get my foot in the door.
I do eventually want to do Red Hat certification; ASU has an entire ~15 hour video course in its library for the Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator exam. I don't think what Red Hat as a company is doing right now in terms of hiding its source code for its open source operating system is right, but they make the hardest systems administration exam and you can use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux binary compatible clone that's actually open source through Rocky Linux, so it's not skills that are only applicable to Red Hat's own enterprise solution. Also, I think Red Hat, besides some blunders since IBM started meddling, is a really good business model actually. I think it's totally fine to only release your open source operating system for a charge and offer additional support on top of that. That's actually rad and that's a use case that was specifically intended by the FSF to be okay with the GNU General Public License. They've just taken steps to make the process of releasing an open source version of their operating system without going directly through them harder to do and makes you jump through hoops to get something binary compatible instead of making it easy. But the point anyways for the certification is to find jobs, and I think Red Hat is still the enterprise software standard when it comes to Linux server infrastructure, so it should look good to take the certification test and get that on my resume. Though, the test costs a significant amount of money, so that's a barrier right now if I take the test with my own funds in preparation for finding a job.
I spent a lot of time during my degree just exploring different interests really, like my love for computers or my love for logic, and it was weird how that interplayed with everything else. I had my social life (for awhile), my homework and lecture times, my job, and then my personal interests, in roughly that order of importance, so my personal time felt like a total afterthought. But, I would squeeze in time to do what I love between my other tasks. When I worked for Bricks and Minifigs (briefly), I would have 15 minute breaks, so I would run out to my car far away from the building, chain smoke cigarettes, and scribble down proofs as fast as I possibly could from the exercises from some obscure logic book or proof book, then rush back inside still thinking about what I was doing and not really paying attention to my job.
By the last two years of my degree I just gave up on being a star student. I still did really well (only dipping into B's my last semester, and failing one class with an "E" a year before that), but I just realized what I liked and what the school was offering me were two different things. So I would show up to classes for the first third to half of the semester, then just only show up sporadically or not at all by the end. I would always show up to tests and I would generally do most of my homework, but that was it. That opened me up to a lot more free time, which is why I was able to start learning Rust and write some cool libraries like exutf8g. I just gave up on school. I read the book, and after awhile you realize the professors follow the course material in the book pretty closely (or otherwise are very lax in their grading and it doesn't matter) so you can just stay home, read in the comfort of your bed, and flip between that and some coding project to stay motivated on both. That's how I managed to stay sane through the end of my degree because six and a half years is a really, really long time, if you think about it. A lot of my life was wasted going to school and by the end I just wished I was set free to do more things I was actually interested in. And hey, now I am! (Hence the large spurt of new content and framework design on this site recently.)
If I could do anything differently? I would have done a computer science degree, or if I was going to a very IT heavy school, I would've gone into a full IT Linux degree. Maybe in some weird reverse sense it's actually good I did a math degree, because computer science and Linux is still this fun thing to me with some mystery to it that I can uncover and learn, and a degree might totally burn that interest out of me. And computer science at ASU had huge lecture halls for all the classes, whereas at ASU the highest attendance math class I was in had 40 people, and the highest attendance class total had maybe 60. The computer science lecture halls could have like 200, or be a virtual lecture hall with 5000. That's just too much. I already felt alienated with 39 other students in a class with me, so having another 199 is super intimidating and depressing. And there's a lot of trash I actually DON'T want to learn about with computer science and IT, like pretty much anything having to do with Windows or proprietary software, and I'd probably have to sit through that and feel miserable at some point. That would have been even more wasteful of my time than the philosophy and math classes I took.
So, yeah. I did it. I got the degree. Whoopie. I think the things I really care about, the things I really love, I just sort of taught myself. But maybe going over those fundamentals so many times filled in some gaps for me. I definitely reason much more clearly than I did before, spending hours reading through and synthesizing and formulating attacks against philosophical papers or assertions. But that doesn't come up as often as you'd think either, unless you're out there debating people all the time. The most useful things I've learned in terms of my day to day life I learned through staying up to 3am installing Gentoo on a laptop, or watching a Tsoding video, or reapplying thermal paste to my ThinkPad, or reading through tedious and long documentation files. That was where the learning really happened in college. Everything else was kind of just... meh.
June 5, 2026