Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

Anybody reading this site knows that college is not a necessary step on the way to entrepreneurship, including you.

But less talked about it is the "journey" part.

As long one is in touch with personal motivations and goals, then college seems fine.

You're in no rush, financially comfortable, and as eager for experiences as you are your innovative product. I'd say college sounds like a cool idea. I'd just be careful to pick a good program, otherwise it could be painful/frustrating.

I'm about to go to college part-time with no professional necessity at all. I'm in a different spot than the OP. I don't have a first degree. But I do have a fine geeky career that I'm about to step out of to start a business (way less capital intensive than his idea :D ), and am going to college with the hope of learning a subject matter, but no real expectations. Just mostly for the experience.

You make a valid point and I'd do the same if I were in your shoes. I'm just worried of wasting too much time pursuing rabbit holes when I already know where I want to go. At the same time, I've been more than once surprised with things that seemed unimportant before. The question then is how to filter out the "rabbit holes", while keeping the ignored interesting stuff.

"you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." -- Kierkegaard

One thing I'm doing, is NOT pursuing a degree program. This enables me to do lots more "a la carte" class-picking.

I've had mixed response from the schools I've talked to about this. The admin folks seem mildly confused/insulted, but the profs are cool usually. It does take more overhead to explain your situation, meet w/profs to get out of prereqs, but it's pretty do-able.

> The admin folks seem mildly confused/insulted, but the profs are cool usually.

Hah, yeah. Mostly because of each side's interests: the job of the administration is to sell the idea that $university's degrees are a valuable thing you should want, so it is completely crazy to them that you don't want their degree. But the profs ideally want to teach stuff they think is important/interesting to people who want to learn it, and to them, the people taking the class only because it's required for the degree are sort of the least desirable students, while someone taking it even though they don't have to, because they actually think it's interesting, is great.

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