[davidthefat]

I am on the other side of the spectrum when it comes to career choice. I want to be working on research and creating computer architectures and then creating the OS and compilers, assemblers and stuff like that. I want to work on stuff like supercomputers and distributed computing systems, quantum computers and cool biz like that. I actually want to make robots that use a distributed memory computing systems. Now this is not a farfetched goal. By the time I graduate college and go into grad school, it would be the norm if the pace is the way it is now. So these tools would be invalid to me because I would be creating similar software. I like open source because I can look at the source and learn.

Then after all that, I want to be a professor. Now seems like a very strange life, but it appeals to me. It is the equivalent to playing in the NFL, but for computer geeks.

That is the reason why I was pretty disappointed with the FRC. I wanted to learn how to do all that low level stuff. I thought it was literally get a bunch of electrical components and soldering them together and making everything from scratch. Its not what I was looking for, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.
By the time I graduate college, I would have had 10 years of C++ experience under my belt... But will that experience help in the world of super low level programming?