Essay · 2026 · 3 min
Your syllabus was written before GPT existed.
If you're an engineering student in 2026, parts of your education were outdated on arrival. That's not a reason to drop out. It's a reason to run a second curriculum in parallel.
If you're an engineering student in 2026, you're probably already outdated. Your syllabus was written before GPT existed. Your curriculum treats machine learning as an elective , the way an earlier decade treated “the internet” as an elective.
This isn't a complaint about my university. Universities move at the speed of committees; the field moves at the speed of preprints. No syllabus survives contact with a field that reinvents itself every six months. Expecting it to is the actual mistake.
The two-curriculum strategy
The degree still matters , the fundamentals it teaches (data structures, operating systems, math) are the parts of computer science that don't expire. So I stopped treating the syllabus as the ceiling and started treating it as the floor.
- 01Curriculum one: the degree. Fundamentals, discipline, the credential. Non-negotiable.
- 02Curriculum two: self-assigned, public, and shipped. Every semester, at least one thing that exists at a URL and one thing written about it.
Nobody is coming to update your syllabus. The update is you.
The second curriculum is where the internships, competitions and conversations have actually come from. Not because the projects were impressive , some weren't , but because a shipped thing gives people something concrete to talk to you about. A grade doesn't.