My buddy is now an expert on supercomputers after having taught himself all about it over a period of 3 years. He’s now going to college to study computing, and hopes that in a couple of years he’ll be out with a degree and either do something in government or work for industry.
Me, I’m still stuck with tying my shoelaces (I can’t seem to find the perfect “knot”). I’m sure it’ll all come to me in time.
So what about the other Dopers out there? How many of you guys taught yourself - or are in the process of teaching yourselves - something entirely new and exciting?
I don’t mean like learning how to meditate or collect stamps, rather a whole field of study, such as neurobiology or astromedicine?
I currently do low-level database and SQL administration and technical support. I do not have any technical certifications or formal instruction; I absorbed relational theory and SQL syntax by trial and error, and by picking through other people’s scripts. People in my group now come to me with questions.
I have composed music for several theatrical and film projects. I have no formal music training; I taught myself to play keyboard, and then to read, write, and arrange music.
I like learning about stuff and trying new things. For example, I once read a statistics textbook for fun, and applied some of it to a previous job, but I’ve forgotten almost all of it in the years since. I’d do it again without hesitation.
Learned to play guitar and bass myself. Also learned prosthetic make-up effects on my own from books and trial and error. I’ve done make-up EFX for video and film. Got into filmmaking when I was a kid and when I finally got formal education I found out I pretty much already knew what I was doing already. It was mostly industry terminology that I was lacking.
To borrow a line from Cervaise, much of what I know is self-taught. I have had no formal training in anything.
I taught myself to play piano, drums, bass and guitar, compose and arrange music, record it, mix it and master it. When the analog techology I learned on went obsolete, I taught myself digital recording. As a result, I’ve also learned to restore records from a noisy, scratchy state to such an impeccably clean, noise-and-scratch-free state that you couldn’t tell you were listening to a piece of vinyl. Several records I’ve restored have been officially re-released where master tapes could not be found, and hundreds more are floating around the world.
A lot of the work I do at my job is digital audio editing. The people here come to me to do what they can’t figure out how to do themselves, and the’re always agog at how effortlessly I can make them sound like pros!
One day, I decided I wanted to make pieces of metal stick together. I boldly went to the cheap tool outlet and came home with a welder. I taught myself to make the ugliest, weakest metal contraptions on the planet. Not really all that proud, but I have to justify the expenditure in my mind. It isn’t really all that hard, and I’m really not all that good. Welding is just one of many, many things I do poorly.
You should see how badly I can screw up two pieces of wood.
I taught myself Dreamweaver and a lot of basic HTML from the help of books and online tutorials. I also taught myself how to use Fireworks. As you can tell, I really like computer and webpage designing.
I taught myself programming from a very early age. (My dad got me started. “Look, you can make a loop to have it print out all the numbers from 1 to a million!” I was hooked ever since.)
I’ve read tons of books on programming languages, data structures, algorithms, etc. And then I’d do the important stuff, which is trying it out to make sure I knew what I was doing. I would sit around for hours figuring out how to make a linked list of pointers to root nodes of binary trees, then how to traverse them in the right order.
Hmmm… when you say “without help” you seem to mean “without formal instruction” - am I correct? See, I’m self-taught in a huge number of areas, mostly hobbies that got out of control. But almost all of my knowledge on any of these things was gathered, rather than discovered, if that makes sense. I have been able to puzzle out things that I HAVEN’T been able to learn from books, but I’d say that makes up less than 1 or 2% of my knowledge.
I do a little neurosurgery on the side. Not that difficult once you get the hang of it. Just a bit of trial and error. The errors mostly do work work in middle management.
Most of my IT skills (I’m in support and development as a job) are self-taught; absorbed by trial and error, examination of how other people did it, taking things apart and generally asking about on the net.
I am a researcher with more than a few published papers on my vita. Not only have I taught myself really complicated stuff, I have actually created leading edge stuff. Some of which now appears in textbooks that are used in college classes.
I strongly believe that the purpose of an education is to “learn how to teach yourself.” But too many students (virtually all college students I taught in recent years) just have no concept of “how to learn” of any sort.
I have told thousands of students: The purpose of what I am teaching is not to get you a job when you graduate. It is so you can get a job 30 years after you graduate.
I was teaching myself things beyond my grade by grade 2. I taught myself virtually all of my high school math and a lot of science. But college was harder- at first. But soon I learned how teach myself college level material and away I went.
I am a computer geek, so as others have posted, over 99% of what I know I taught myself. There wasn’t Java, C++, Unix, TCP/IP, etc. when I was in college. No one gave me a class in any of these. I taught myself. Then I taught others.
There is nothing in the least that I consider remarkable about this.
Oh, well, now I feel really inferior. I was going to say I taught myself to tat (that’s a lace-making technique) out of a book. It was quite difficult without someone to show me the exact finger manipulations of the thread.
I also learned Java and .net, but they’re not difficult, so I don’t think that counts.
Ranger What the flipping heck is “differential cryptanalysis”?
I’m in IT too, 99% self taught. But that’s pretty normal. Another self taught musician too, but I bet that’s nothing compared to differential cryptanalysis.
I taught myself how to play the guitar, knit, crochet, and embroider (crewel and cross-stitch). I had a few sewing lessons, but most of what I know is self-taught. I learned a great deal about heraldry in one evening, enough to make up a blazon for a roleplaying game, and not only did I make the shield symbol legal in both the fantasy world AND in the real world, I was able to work in relevant info about my character.
I’ve taken apart, cleaned, fixed, and re-assembled a good many small appliances. I never have any parts left over, and the appliance always runs at least as well as it did before I started tinkering with it. Most of the time, it works a lot better. I think that this is just an inborn knack, either one has it or not. One can certainly practice and learn to do better on the next item, but it involves being able to see how things fit together, and how to take them apart without damaging them.
Most of the technical administration stuff that I do on this MB is self-taught. I will frequently say that I’m not a (computer) technical person, and I’m not, but, for instance, when we switched over to the new version of vBulletin I found that there are different ways of doing stuff. So I had to examine every screen carefully, and try to figure stuff out. So far, I don’t think that I’ve had to ask for instructions.
MLS, you taught yourself to do tatting? That’s impressive. I got out a book on lacemaking once and decided it was too hard.
When I was little, I taught myself handspinning by hand-twiting little bits of wool of a blanket. I then figured out a spindle (entirely on my own- don’t think I’d ever seen one), made it, and by grade nine, submitted a hand-spun, handwoven tapestry for Art class. It wasn’t a good tapestry, and it would be nicer to say that I figured it all out because I’m smart, and not because I have trouble visualising any sort of spatial machine-related anything, but I really don’t understand how do do anything unless I figure it out on my own.
I learned cooking the same way.
I’ve also taught myself sewing, pattern making, applique beadwork, wire-and-bead jewelry making, and chainmail.
I think I’m a completely kinaethetic learner. I also have a compulsive need to fiddle with things.
Self taught juggler here, though I think most jugglers are self taught anyways. Also, like most posters here, I am a self taught web developer and systems admin. It was just one of those things I had to learn on the job as I went.
I’ve taught myself how to ride a motorcycle. I did have a book, but that doesn’t much help for everything. I’ve also taught myself how to work on the motorcycle, not for everything, but I can do a valve adjustment, swap tires things like that.
I also taught myself how to swim, for the most part anyway, I was on teams but they don’t teach you how to do the different strokes, they just say do it. I had to learn butterfly na breast strokes on my own.
I can also do a number of programing languages that I learned myself, but that got boring quick. I think once you know one you can figure out the rest pretty easy.