I've been doing IT in one form or another for about 15 years now. I have a BS in Computer Science. Not exactly the same thing... But close enough for government work.
Having read through the entire thread the first thing I'm going to tell you is that you seriously need to work on your communication skills.
I don't care what kind of mad skillz you've got, you're going to have to deal with other human beings. You're going to have to communicate with them.
A large amount of it will be written. You'll need to be able to string words together in a coherent manner. Sure, yes, this is a forum... But it's a good idea to get into the habit of writing semi-coherently everywhere. You do not want to accidentally slip into casual forumspeak in the middle of a professional correspondence. It's especially easy to spell/capitalize things correctly these days. The software virtually does it for you.
Also in the vein of communication skills - learn how to take criticism more constructively. You aren't perfect. You never will be. Somebody out there is going to tell you that you're doing something wrong. You need to be able to take that criticism and do something useful with it.
As for the education part of things... I don't think there's really a whole hell of a lot for me to tell you.
If you're genuinely interested in IT you should already be doing your own reading and research. You should be reading various IT-related forums, peeking into various open-source projects, grabbing random books from the store/library, etc. You'll be introduced to new concepts and authors throughout the course of your education - some of them will interest you, some of them will not. You'll naturally go learn more about the interesting stuff.
I could point you at some classics... But you should probably have read them by now. If not, they'll come up in your classes soon enough. I could point you at some texts I found especially useful, but they'll likely be completely useless to you. I could list some of the textbooks I read during my education, but they'll be out of date by now. IT is a fast-paced field. Printed text has a hard time keeping up. Your best bet is going to be on-line documentation and collaboration.
If you aren't genuinely interested in IT, stop now. Folks in IT work long hours for relatively crappy pay. If you don't enjoy what you do you're going to get burnt out very quickly. And we've got more than enough clueless code monkeys just slogging through the day for a paycheck. We don't need any more of them. We need genuinely passionate people.
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Topic: I THINK IM SMART..... (Read 4546 times)