School Taught Me How to Think, The Rest Was Up to Me

I study at ENSTA Algiers, one of Algeria's grandes écoles in engineering and computer science. Getting in wasn't easy, the curriculum is demanding, and the academic culture is competitive by design.

And yet, somewhere in my second year, I had a realization that changed how I approach everything: school is not trying to make me a developer. It's trying to make me an engineer.

Those are not the same thing.

The Pattern I Started Noticing

Look around any engineering school and you'll find the same pattern: students who are brilliant, motivated, and working hard, but with no clear answer to the question "what do you actually want to do?"

A lot of that energy goes into one direction: marks. And I understand why. The system rewards it, parents expect it, and in a competitive school there's real pressure to rank well.

But marks toward what goal?

For someone going into research, that focus is completely valid. The academic track is real and it leads somewhere concrete. But for students who want a job in the industry, who want to build products, who want to work for international companies, the relationship between your GPA and your career readiness is much weaker than the system implies.

I've seen students who graduated with strong records and then spent months figuring out what they actually know how to build. The grades were real, the skills weren't fully there yet.

The Proof Is in Our Own Curriculum

In our second year at ENSTA, we had a multi-disciplinary project module. The idea was to bring together everything we had learned across two years and build something real. And the results were genuinely impressive: full production SaaS applications, mobile apps, AI-powered tools, projects with actual startup and entrepreneurship angles.

But here's the thing. Look at what those two years of modules actually covered:

Mathematics: calculus, algebra, probabilities
Methodological modules: electricity, electronics, optics
CS fundamentals: algorithms with C, operating systems, computer architecture, OOP with Java

If you got 20/20 on every single one of those without doing anything outside of class, you would not be able to write a single line of HTML. Not one.

So how did students build those projects? Not from the modules. What the modules gave them was something harder to see but more valuable: the ability to look at a problem, break it down, and figure out what needs to be built and why. That entrepreneurial instinct, that capacity to identify a real problem and design a solution for it, is exactly what two years of rigorous fundamentals had been training without anyone saying it out loud.

The web frameworks, the APIs, the deployment pipelines, students learned all of that on their own, on the side, out of necessity. The school gave them the mindset. The rest they had to go find themselves.

Why School Can't Keep Up, And Isn't Supposed To

Here is something I had to accept early: my professors are not failing me when they don't cover the latest frameworks or explain what tools the industry is currently using. That's not their job.

A professor teaching databases has a fixed program to finish in a fixed number of weeks. They teach normalization, indexing, transaction models, the concepts that will still be relevant in 10 years. They don't have time to go beyond that, and honestly even if they did, the specific tools change so fast it would barely matter.

Think about what happens in this field every single year. New frameworks, new languages getting traction, new protocols, new standards, new architectures. The industry moved from REST to GraphQL, from class components to hooks, from monoliths to microservices to serverless, and it keeps going. No school program can keep up with that pace, and it shouldn't try to. A curriculum updated every semester would still be teaching last year's tools.

What school does teach, when you pay attention, is:

How to think systematically.
How to read documentation and absorb something new.
How to reason about a problem before writing a single line of code.
How to approach a system you've never seen and figure out what's actually going on.

That's the engineering mindset. And it's genuinely rare. A lot of people who skipped the academic path and went straight into building things are incredibly productive but sometimes lack the foundation to understand why something works the way it does. School gives you that, if you're paying attention to the right things.

The Balance I'm Trying to Hold

I'm not saying grades don't matter. They do, just not in the way most students think.

Finishing my degree matters to me because "CS student and developer" is a stronger profile than "developer who didn't finish his studies." The credential signals something real to employers: that you can commit to something long-term, that you understand fundamentals, that you can work within structured constraints. It makes you presentable in a way that pure self-teaching doesn't always provide on its own.

But studying hard does not mean you stop building. And building does not mean you stop studying.

I've been running both tracks at the same time. Working part-time as a Full-Stack Web Developer on a real production codebase. Learning NestJS not from a tutorial but by shipping actual features with a senior engineer. Doing an internship at Ericsson where I found a real operational problem and started figuring out how to solve it with AI.

None of that required me to get bad grades. And none of it would have been possible if I had spent all my time chasing perfect grades.

What I Want Both Sides to Hear

Students: your school modules are not everything. They will not make you an engineer on their own. The program is a foundation, not the whole building. The moment you start treating it as the finish line, you've already limited yourself. Start building. Find real problems. Work on something that isn't graded.
Professors: the best ones I've had already understand this. But it's worth saying clearly, school modules alone will not produce engineers ready for the industry. Students who are already working, already building, already engaged with the professional world are not distracted students. They are exactly the outcome the school should want.

The school program is here to teach you how to think like an engineer.

You are the one who applies that thinking to what the world actually needs.

Note: This is purely a personal point of view from a student who entered the professional world early alongside his studies. It is not a criticism of any institution, teacher, or fellow student. Every path is different, and this is just mine.