I defended my bachelor's thesis today.
A few hours ago I was standing in front of a committee, answering questions about research I'd spent months on. Now it's over. The degree is done.
And somewhere between the handshakes and the walk home, the obvious question surfaced: was it worth it?
I've been in tech long enough to know this is a loaded question. There are people who will tell you a CS degree is the only real foundation. There are people who will tell you it's an overpriced piece of paper and you should have been building on GitHub instead. Both camps are more confident than the reality warrants.
Here's my honest answer, written today of all days, while it's still fresh.
What university actually gave me
Let me start with the real value — not the stuff universities put in brochures, but what I actually walked away with.
A forcing function for breadth. Left to my own devices, I would have learned what interested me and ignored the rest. University forced me into subjects I wouldn't have chosen — statistics, business strategy, systems theory, organizational behavior. Some of it felt irrelevant at the time. Some of it turned out to be exactly the kind of thinking I use when making product decisions now. You don't know which is which until later.
The ability to learn structured, unfamiliar material under pressure. This sounds abstract until you're in your first job and someone hands you a 60-page technical specification and expects you to understand it by Friday. Surviving exams on topics you didn't choose teaches you something about how to process dense, foreign material quickly. That skill transfers.
Credentials that open certain doors. I'll be honest about this one. There are companies — particularly larger ones, particularly in certain European markets — where a degree is a filter. Not because it proves you can code, but because HR processes require it. Knowing those doors exist and deciding whether you care about them is a legitimate part of the calculation.
Time. Three years is a long time, and university gave me a structured environment to spend it in. I built IdeaPick during my degree. I started writing during my degree. I had space to experiment with what I actually wanted to do — not because the curriculum encouraged it, but because the degree didn't consume every hour of every day.
What university didn't give me
This list is also real, and worth naming plainly.
Production-level technical skills. I did not learn to build a Next.js app with streaming LLM responses, Row Level Security, and proper rate limiting in any lecture. The technical skills that make me employable as a frontend developer came from building things outside of class — personal projects, side products, reading documentation, making mistakes and fixing them.
How to ship. Universities teach you how to submit. There's a deadline, you hand something in, you get a grade. Shipping a product to real users — handling feedback, fixing things that break in production, making something that someone actually pays for — is a different activity entirely, and it's not in the curriculum.
How the industry actually works. The gap between academic software engineering and professional software engineering is wide. Version control practices, code review culture, incident response, how teams actually make decisions — none of this was covered in a way that reflected what I've experienced in real contexts.
Clarity on what I wanted. I went in hoping the degree would help me figure out what I was doing with my career. It didn't, really. That clarity came from building things, talking to people, and paying attention to what I couldn't stop thinking about.
The question nobody asks honestly enough
Here's what I think the "is university worth it" debate usually gets wrong: it treats the degree as the variable, when the real variable is what you do alongside it.
Two people can complete the same degree program. One spends the time attending lectures, passing exams, and doing the minimum required. The other does the same lectures and exams while also building projects, writing about what they're learning, and using the structure of university as a container for a much larger program of self-directed work.
Those two people come out with the same certificate and radically different outcomes.
The degree is not what creates the difference. The habits, the projects, and the initiative do.
So the honest version of the question isn't "is university worth it." It's "what are you planning to do with the time, and does university help or hinder that?" For some people, a structured environment with deadlines and access to academic resources is genuinely useful scaffolding. For others, that same structure is a cage that slows them down.
Where I land
I don't regret my degree. I learned things I wouldn't have sought out on my own. I had time I used well — not because university told me to, but because I decided to. And the credential will matter in some contexts, even if it doesn't define me.
But if you asked me whether the degree was the most valuable thing I did in the last three years, the honest answer is no. Building IdeaPick taught me more about product, architecture, and user thinking than three years of lectures. Writing consistently taught me more about communication than any academic paper.
The degree was the frame. The work I did inside and around it was the picture.
If you're deciding whether to go — or whether to finish — I won't tell you what to do. The answer depends on what you want to build, who you want to work for, and how you learn best. Those are questions only you can answer.
What I'll say is this: wherever you are, the credentials matter less than the work. The work is what follows you.
Did you go to university? Do you think it was worth it for your tech career — or would you make a different call if you were starting again today?
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