The Mysticism of Graduation

“So when are you graduating?”

They have asked me this question dozens, hundreds of times in recent years. I have always answered in a couple of ways: “I’m studying, but you know, I also work in the meantime, so I’m going slow”, or “eh, right now I’ve paused for a few months, work takes up my whole day, I never finish”.

But it is never that simple.

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I enrolled in the Computer Engineering faculty in October 2013, and I can say that I really lived university life for only 5 months. In January 2014, the same day as my first exam, Geometry, I founded Tweaknology, a blog that soon became the launch pad for all those who worked on it. I am very happy with what Tweaknology was for all of us.

From that moment, I started dividing my life between study and articles, for about a year. Then what I wrote and published made me increasingly visible in the work ecosystem, especially the tech and startup one. And so, with job offers here and there, the time I dedicated to study thinned out, in favor of that dedicated to work.

Mine is not an atypical story, nor original. I know many people who, like me, in the first years of university undertook activities that then defined their career.

I did so many different things, in the years that passed between 2014 and today. At a certain point, I had decided that university should take a back seat, because if the purpose of getting a degree is to find a job and I was already working, I no longer needed a degree. The logic was solid.

Over time, I realized that I was moving further and further away from what I wanted to live for: I had chosen to do Computer Engineering because I wanted to become an Engineer (and I write it with a capital E, yes) one of those who, in my childhood imagination, creates extraordinary and almost magical things that make the world go round. And instead my job was becoming increasingly closer to marketing and communication. I’m not saying I don’t like it, on the contrary. I studied a lot to be a public speaker and to know how a product is positioned, although I don’t always succeed well. But I had made a choice, years ago, and I hadn’t made it at random: I wanted to become an engineer because I adored the idea of creating things from nothing: creating an app, a website, an infrastructure, a framework. When I started Tweaknology, I felt the same way: although I wrote few lines of code to develop the site, I ‘tinkered’ a lot. I learned to solve problems without stopping at the first obstacle, and to see how the public reacted to what I developed. It was beautiful.

A couple of years ago I took an apparently rather difficult exam, but in practice very simple: Mobile Computing. The goal was to create a mobile application from scratch using Xamarin, a development environment to write code once and translate it instantly to all platforms. We made a usable app in a couple of months, working on it not too often either. There were 4 of us. We experienced collaborative development and integration between design and software development. And we created something.

The app never came out on the App Store, it was just a university project (by the way we had developed some features, such as reporting bus and tram crowding, which are in Google Maps today), but I had felt that thrill of creating again.

Of course, I could have created something even without a degree, but it would have really been a failure not to complete my studies. I could easily graduate, because I knew I was able to understand all aspects of Computer Engineering, so why not do it? And then some subjects, studied well, would have made me understand aspects that perhaps if I had studied alone I would not have fully understood.

And so, in the following 12 months, I passed two other exams: Databases and Algorithms and Data Structures, very specific. At that moment, I realized that I had effectively passed almost all the characterizing exams of the third year, leaving behind only one third-year exam and some first and second-year exams.

I can say that my girlfriend also played her part, getting angry every time I messed around instead of studying, and in fact I am grateful to her: without her constant support I would not have continued so consistently.

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Today I tell this story because I just passed a critical exam, and I have 3 exams left to graduate. I have plenty of time to concentrate and take these 3 exams during the year: this podcast is also a letter of intent. If I don’t graduate in 2020, I will have made a fool of myself carved into the internet forever.

Today I feel more secure: until last year I felt stuck between the promise of graduating, that of running a startup, of working on an important project, of setting aside enough time to be with my family and my girlfriend. Now instead, after I chose to ‘rationalize’ my life by eliminating everything possible, I realize that, focusing only on the degree and my work (which fortunately is now flexible), I can finally complete something.

I know many former university colleagues who left university: some to launch a successful company, some to focus on work. I understand them: I also went through that phase, the one where university is in the background. Probably, if I had known that I could create a business without having to graduate, I wouldn’t even have started university.

But, I believe perhaps also thanks to university, which introduced me to people like me and with my same interests, I understood that I could do it.

Getting a degree today, for me (and I believe for many others of my generation), is not a way to access the world of work, on the contrary: I know so many people who came out with 110 cum laude from the master’s degree of any faculty and who struggle to find a job in Italy, or to find a job that is paid well and fairly.

Getting a degree is a way of saying that yes, we have the piece of paper. That we know what the generation of professors who teach us technologies and methodologies born before us wants. But that if while we take the degree we are also working, it means that when we no longer have the thought of having to graduate, we will be free to think about creating the technologies and methodologies of the future.

And that we will transmit them to others using innovative, unconventional methods that we will invent based on need, on necessity.

And that will be our revenge.

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