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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Finish your education. It's the basis for your future.

And if you think it's not, why on Earth are you paying so much for it?

Don't waste your money. Pay more attention to your studies, and get the most out of it.

And if you're already getting A's and still bored, start doing more side projects. Things that are useful to you or (better yet) someone else you know. Try to write up a spec for the project first, and then work from the spec. Then go back to the customer/friend and see how close the project is to what they really wanted. It's a real eye-opener.

Be putting all of your best code in a portfolio to prepare for job hunting.

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I totally disagree.

Don't "Finish your education" first. Do side projects while you're still a student - this is the best time to find other passionate people that are willing to work for nothing and are easy to convince to join you. Also - during studies you usually don't have to worry about your paycheck, so it's easier to spend a lot of time on your thing.

I'd suggest the exact opposite - don't worry about As. As long as you pass you're good. People that focus on As study so much that they don't have time to work on their own stuff and I'd much more like to hire 23 year old with some nice portfolio and Cs than an A student with no portfolio.

And the final piece of your advice I also disagree with. Don't do specs! Specs are for people with experience. If you have no experience there is no way you will make a good design.

Go with the flow, do projects that you're passionate about. Your code will suck, your user interface will suck, but it will get better with time.

I agree completely - during your studies you have tons of free time. Once you graduate and have to find a job all that disappears, and you may not have enough energy to pursue your ideas after spending time at work. If there's a project you can't get out of your head, there's no better time to work on it than now. Even if it doesn't grow into anything useful, you'll learn tons of stuff and you'll be able to apply that knowledge in the future.

> Finish your education. It's the basis for your future.

Not sure about this one.

Sure, good education helps a lot, but not all education is good, and sometimes (and it's probably especially true for startups) you will learn much more by just going into a field.

The most famous example of a successful dropout is Bill Gates, and I believe we have a few dropout here at HN as well.

> And if you think it's not, why on Earth are you paying so much for it?

Education is so expensive because lots of people want to get a degree, and high demand means high prices.

High prices do not mean that something is really necessary or useful for you - think of diamonds.

Some education is expensive because you are paying for the name and possibly for the contacts that you might make there. If you go to a big name Ivy League school expecting to learn from prominent professors, you are likely to be disappointed. Many of the big names at the big schools are taking off one year in three in sabbaticals, and when they are there they're focusing their attention on their own research first and their graduate students second.

There are a lot of good schools that focus on actually providing their students with a good education, and their costs are substantially less. There are a couple of books that provide information about good schools beyond the Ivy League:

1. Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You

2. Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You

An added bonus: the money you save by not going to an Ivy League school can help fund your first startup.

What's often left out is the other side of the picture.

Yes, Bill Gates dropped out, but what about the unknown others who dropped out and are not successful?

I agree with kolinko up above, education is important, but you can also use that time to work on your own projects. Whether those projects go anywhere or not, you'll still have the experience from workong on them.

And if you're already getting A's and still bored, start doing more side projects.

Or: Take harder classes and take classes in a different field. Stop by and ask the professor's office and ask them the hardest question you can think of. And instead of having them give you the answer, talk with them and try to figure it out yourself.

This is pretty enlightening, thanks for this! This is monumentally better hearing it on here than from my professors...

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