7 things you need to learn in college - part 2

This is part 2 of my series of things you should manage to pick up in college despite your classes.

See Part 1 to read about the importance of communication.

These are based on notes from a brief talk I gave to a bunch of students. The topic I came up with was "What I wish someone would have told me back when I was in their shoes" or something like that.

2) You will make (terrible) mistakes, but effort and time will help

My first week as a unix system administrator - I got hired because of who I knew, not my 2/10 knowlege of HPUX and AIX - I did a completely boneheaded thing. I learned that recursive directory expansion generally reads '..' before '.' - all I wanted to do was remove a bunch of dot files in /tmp on the main College of Engineering Computing Center file-server. Trust me - "rm -rf .*" in /tmp is not what you want to do when your boss is gone for the weekend. Fortunately I got suspicious about 45 seconds into the recursive removal of the entire filesystem and stopped the process. No user data was lost, but the OS was well beyond nuked... Fortunately my bosses boss was near and patient and several hours later, the server was back on line. At the time, I felt like I was a big loser - like I would never overcome the embarassment of being so obviously stupid. They were patient with me, and I learned a lot and became somewhat more cautious and competent. I remember the occasion with amusement now, and a lot less anguish than I used to. Keep working to improve yourself, seek training, play with technolgies, learn, have fun, and you'll soon find your mistakes are usually smaller and more livable. Also remember when you see someone else in the same situation that you can help them by being patient - by teaching. You can learn a lot by mentoring others with less knowlege.


Next up: Part 3 - Fix the root causes of problems - don't just band-aid symptoms.