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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs.

I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG.

Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

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Go have a beer with a college roommate. I bet the memories will come flooding back.

I have a terrible time recalling stuff like this. But then I meet up with an old friend and I start remembering a huge amount of stuff I hadn't thought about in a decade.

I seem to recall mainly experiences or events (not details like PG).

Eg I can recall the super bowl party from 10 years ago, no idea who played or won.

I graduated undergrad 25 years ago. I can't randomly recall tons, but there is some random stuff I do remember -- like getting an F on my first test in Numerical Analysis, but then ending with the highest score in the class for the quarter (yes, a lot of people failed every test).

But I still have my old course catalog and flipping through that, a lot of memories jump to mind in classes I totally forgot I had. So I think with some prompts you can probably remember a lot more than you think.

Many of my courses are deeply etched in my memories. Static Fields followed by Dynamic Fields in the EE department. A survey course covering Lisp, Snobol, and Prolog. A C99 class covering engineering traffic flow. My first Fortran course where I figured out how to get the compiler to spit assembly language. A course in General Semantics which vastly influenced my thinking. Linear Algebra course, which was the only college math course that I aced. The beginning circuits course learning about Kirchhoff's law. A control system theory class. And working with my eventual advisor who was studying control feed back systems that caused the Bonneville Power Administration network to oscillate in frequency.

And there was a lot of non-class stuff that you seem to get just hanging around, like the Marshall McLuhan medium talk, Larry Atkins who wrote the champion chess program that ran on the CDC 6600 (No, he would insist, it is not Artificial Intelligence--just good engineering). Reading Dijkstra's paper "GOTO considered harmful" which was absolutely true in spades for Fortran II. Keypunching jobs for running in the batch processing mode of the CDC 6600. And seriously fun co-op jobs.

PG remembers because he actively tried to remember it to write an essay. If you sat down and tried to write down your college memories, I'm sure you'll remember many things. Your memories are on the hard disk, you just have to bring it to RAM.

Try thinking about data structures, programming language, AI, OS, networking, etc classes you took. You must remember something about the lectures. If not, certainly the projects that you worked on.

Reminiscing is an active process. Sit down and really spent some time reawakening those memories and you'll be surprised what comes back.

It depends on how fondly you look back at that time and if you have academic inclinations/had strong academic inclinations before you went to college (especially if your family has them).

Plus I'd imagine it depends a lot on the intensity of the college studies. I'd imagine folks going to MIT would remember more stuff than people at a random community college.

Besides what the other folks are saying regarding jogging your memory.

I only recall things that I think about a lot, which tend to be when I learned lessons and it had an effect on my life's direction. That and anything I found really interesting I still remember. For reference, I'm 42, so it's been 2 decades.

Sounds like you need to start writing/journalling/blogging. It's amazing how it shapes your brain's ability to remember events.

I graduated less than ten years ago, and I don't think I could immediately name all the classes I took.

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