In a field like computer science, time is better spent working on personal projects, hashing out ideas with peers and exploring research opportunities than aspiring to get an A in every class. A's make for boring, one dimensional students. People who make priorities based on more complex factors than an arbitrary letter grade are preferable to interact and work with.
Don't waste the opportunity.
Access to a like minded peer group, and researchers to guide you is far harder to get outside of college.
For subjects like math and CS, these things are great substitutes. For things like mycology or religious studies, less so. I think there is something to be said for using your time in college to focus more on the subjects that are basically unlearnable via other channels.
For things like CS though, just sitting down and spending a weekend watching Tim Roughgarden's YouTube channel will give you more than enough algorithm and data structure knowledge to get a job as a developer or whatever.
I beg to differ. I wish college was just me in my room for three months and then a final. No hw, nothing.
Not because I learnt anything more in economics about CS, but because my first CS courses focused on Eiffel and object oriented programming: it was going to solve all our problems! We all think about objects naturally, so we should all program that way! It's the future of industry and science!
Instead, everything I learnt about CS has now been through trying to solve actual practical problems and applying them to the real world. I now have more experience with stats languages, taught myself lisp, and an employed doing analytics, a field and course that didn't exist and wouldn't have been treated seriously had I raised my objections to the curriculum back at uni.
Academics are more fad driven and fearful than they like to admit, even more so today now that industry dollars and popularity has increasingly permeated the academic system.
My story is a unique point in history you say, and it's unlikely to happen again?
On the contrary, I think it's even more likely to apply to today...
That doesn't make sense. There's no required connection to getting high grades and being one dimensional. That sounds like your own personal biased world-view more than how things must actually work in reality. If a person is competent, much less brilliant, and can score high in a class, what exactly is the law of the universe that says they can't work on side projects?
Additionally, our education systems reward repeated success and high marks, not exploration and failure. Thus purely from a stats and analytic perspective, the winning strategy to navigate through such a system is safe specialisation: which again, will trend towards one dimensional students who don't experience or seek out or tolerate failure well. This they stick to what they know, do not push past the limit offered by their graded courses, and tend not to put themselves out there to tackle/expose their weaknesses or areas they view as oblique to their field/strengths.
Show me someone with few failures, and I will show you someone who has never pushed our challenged themselves successfully...
When I was entering college I thought this would be what I'd do in my free time. Instead, it turned out that all of my peers were disinterested in these sorts of things. I still did projects and research and decent internships while having an OK GPA (~3.9) but this definitely isn't possible everywhere.