This may well be locale-dependent, but the great things you describe - I can indeed only imagine.

I did my best to search for like-minded CS students, did my best to seek great teachers. I tried for nearly 2 years - and failed miserably. The handful of students - out of 150 on the year - I could talk and maybe team up with were disappearing one after another, hired by this or that company. The professors were all old, which in this country meant that they were all re-trained into CS after 40 years of career in something else. There was simply no computing here to speak of before the late 80s, it couldn't be any other way. Younger people never even considered becoming academics - the money was simply not there. Without said 40 years of tenure, they would work for something like one-sixth of what industry - the Western companies rapidly expanding into the country - offered. And I don't even want to talk about other students, their expectations and attitudes - it's way too sad.

You know, I actually dreamt of a place where my passion would be shared by others. At every stage of my education, I was told that the next one will be that place and I will be able to finally learn what interests me there. It was all bullshit. There was literally no place in this country where I could learn what interested me, and I couldn't really go anywhere else due to health issues, even after it became possible without passports.

Meanwhile (or actually a bit before that), my English became good enough - much better than that of my profs, who were instead all speaking Russian very well - and the Internet opened to me. I found great teachers there. I found many people sharing my passion - people, with whom I tried implementing stuff, failed, learnt and sometimes succeeded. I've never said I did it all alone - just that it was all 100% outside of college - and mostly outside of this country.

So, you should consider yourself lucky, and I'm really jealous of you. I wonder, how much of my "I did it all myself" attitude is by preference, and how much of it is just trying to cope with all the shattered dreams the educational institutions here had given me. "The good CS programs are designed to provide it to you" - indeed.

Well, that's one part of it, but the other side still stands: I started learning programming at 9 and kept at it by myself for the next decade. I believe learning is a great example of compound interests - the more you learn, the faster you can learn more. By 19 I actually had a good grasp of the basics, and my learning rate was much higher than virtually any other student (except those similar to me). I don't think it would have been easy, even for the "good" programs, schools, and teachers - to teach me, without causing me endless grief and frustration. That's the nature of education systems (I was told, again and again). The fact that mine was anything but "good" multiplied that frustration tenfold.

I really wish I could experience a dream-like environment you talk about. I might have dropped out and gone my own way anyway - but I might not, and might have been that much better off thanks to it. I won't ever know.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I also don't want to paint a fairy land of learning, because it wasn't that for me either. I had a fair share of useless professors as well, and mandatory courses I hated. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle.