Let's Not Completely Give Up on College | Hacker News Reader

Let's Not Completely Give Up on College

blog.thirdyearmba.com

33 pointsdlevine11 comments

College is useful for people who want to make the best of it. My freshman year here I got involved with a research group examining virtualization in high performance computing (supercomputing). By the end of my freshman year I had helped write a big patch for QEMU to virtualize Intel HW instructions and implemented the software compatibility layer for Intel in our own virtual machine monitor. In addition to the invaluable experience this gave me (especially in practical C) I also appeared as a coauthor on the VMM paper in a very prestigious systems conference (IPDPS).

In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer.

This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result.

Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming languages.

If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.

Your experience sounds great.

I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I do believe we must abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence, and ultimately, their value.

For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you have.

I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally, I'm a fan of the second theory:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...

I really sympathise with the point made about allowing yourself (at least) a year to "mature" and/or figure out, even to a small degree, what direction you want to take your life in before going to University. I think if I'd done that I would have been a lot less susceptible to upvoting all the recent "HE is a waste of time" articles.

Philosophically (and practically), not so sure about trying to fix higher education through purely economic/business terms, but then I'm no expert on it.

This is something I needed to hear. I'm considering dropping out of college after only finishing one year. I never felt any motivation towards school, as my grades reflect. I've been trying to decide whether dropping out and trying to find work with a small startup would give my life the meaning and motivation it sorely lacks.

Does this community have any advice?

A) It is early June. Presumably you are not going back to school until September. Make the most of the next three months. Then decide in September.

A rough rule of thumb: If you can't find paying work in software, or at least get yourself on a road that will obviously lead to paying work in software in short order (i.e. build and launch something!) in the next three months you'd probably be wise to go back to school.

B) What are you studying? Might you rather be studying something else? Are you at the right school? There are other schools: Cheaper ones, larger ones, smaller ones, more serious ones, less serious ones.

I have no experience with being unmotivated towards school, so I'm a lousy source of advice. ;) But I'd say that it's better to take some time off of school and search for your true motivation than to go into serious debt in order to spend four years being miserable, earning lousy grades, and barely graduating. You should certainly change something, right now -- your major, your school, your enrollment status, something -- rather than try to just muddle through. College is too expensive to not take seriously.

Ultimately, though, I'd be wary of the folks who encourage you to skip college altogether and forever. Anecdotes from successful people are great and all, but by definition not everyone is above average, and the stats continue to tell a different story: People with college degrees get jobs more easily and earn more money. Of course, if you find yourself getting jobs and earning money you can always put off school until the time when you're not...

I realize that this is an important decision, and as such, am not going to make any irreversible choices until a month before school starts again in the fall.

I'm currently studying Computer Science. I'm pretty sure that this is the right field for me, because the few moments of true motivation tend to come at the initial phases of personal projects, such as a GolfScript interpreter I'm working on (https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript). Most everything else (including my CS classes) feels like jumping through hoops, chasing after a degree that I don't think will be worth much when accompanied by bad grades.

A change is certainly in order, and I hope to find something that works over the summer. If I do get a job, I may return to school when I have a reason other than "It's what you do after high school". Otherwise, I hope to have found something that gives me the motivation to get through school.

Thanks for your advice.

Okay, your plan sounds decent, and good luck to you.

But now that I've learned that you are studying CS (it's a good guess, around here, but one hates to assume) I'll go out on a limb and offer some further advice: Stop. Change majors. Find something that's actually interesting or challenging for you.

Yes, you're obviously way into programming. That's great, every subject is now all about programming. Any other major will absolutely love you. You may start having to lie, telling them that you don't really know what Python is, just so that you don't end up programming all day and all night.

You might even be into CS, in theory, if you found the right program and the right teacher. But you need to remember two crucial facts:

A) Programming bears the same relationship to CS as the management of a professional NASCAR pit crew does to solving the Navier-Stokes equations. It usually doesn't hurt a programmer to have a solid grounding in CS, just as it wouldn't hurt a NASCAR mechanic to have a solid grounding in fluid mechanics, but it's unnecessary, and just because you love engines doesn't mean you'll love Carnot engines.

You can program quite successfully with almost no formal CS training at all, or so my customers and employers have assured me. Moreover, even the best CS program will teach you very little of what you actually need to know day-to-day when you're building software for customers. You will learn all that on your own, or perhaps you will learn it in classes that have nothing to do with CS. (Or, if your little summer project is any guide, you know a bunch of it already and will soon learn the rest through experience.)

B) Even if CS really is right for you and vice versa, that doesn't mean your school's "CS" is. Too many CS classes and programs are apparently designed to provide occupational certifications to future mid-level corporate Java programmers. If majoring in CS seems significantly easier than majoring in math, something is wrong. Go study something else. Math, for example.

I have a Ph.D. (Physics/EE) and I even did a postdoc once so I'm obviously stupidly in love with school at some level. So maybe it's just me. But I can't see any excuse for being bored in college. Colleges are full of interesting things, many of which are so marginally profitable that you'll never find time and money to do them anywhere else, even though they are awesome. Find them. Major in music and jam with some great musicians. (Two of the best software engineers I know started out as classical musicians.) Major in anthropological linguistics and learn to do fieldwork with disappearing language families. Study geology and do all your summer internships in a tent.

Major in ancient languages. (Another of my colleagues dropped out of physics, studied old Norse, bootstrapped his own way into the MMORPG industry after graduation and is now a programmer.) Study chemistry or (ahem) physics. Take some statistics. Neglect not your molecular biology. My usual advice: Study a laboratory science. You can spend the rest of your life sitting around typing for the price of a laptop, a chair, and a coffeemaker, and you don't even need a computer to enjoy a CS book, but after you leave school you will never again see anything like a university science lab unless you have tens of thousands of dollars, a big basement and one hell of a lot of spare time.

I think it depends on what you want to do, or more importantly, what you're able to offer a startup. You're obviously in a much better position if you're an engineer or have a marketable skill.

I didn't go to school, instead I went to work at a software developer out of high school. Sadly I can't compare it to college, but it was a huge learning experience. Being the youngest, by far, at a company of 30 people, especially when I had moved all the way across the country to Los Angeles is a something that took an adventurous spirit and the ability to listen. I thought I was going to conquer the world be the time I was 25, but being among a group of incredibly talented people taught me to go with the flow more, and appreciate the ride.

Anyway, if you find the right situation, it'll be the best thing that's ever happened to you.

I had dropped university this October, after 1.5 months of education. After dropping it:

- I had worked on the good startup and right now I'm working on the awesome one. Of course, I earn big money from them. In this startups everyone that worked with me is 23-30yrs old, so I think that dropping the university when you're on the first/second year of education is an excellent choice (of course, if you don't have any motivation to continue studying).

- I had done what I always wanted to do, but I had no time to do it when I was in the university (open source projects, learning of some programming languages).

- For achieving something, as it said in this article, you need control and motivate yourself to work 10+h/day.

I wouldn't go back for any reason.

If you do decide to drop out, keep in mind that without a degree many professional opportunities will be closed off to you. You'll need to work several times harder than degree holders to prove you know your stuff (or are willing to learn).

This Way Out is the best book for college-level self-study I have used. The book is in 3 parts, the last 2 Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study are too dated to be useful since it was published in 1973. The part that is particularly to the point here is that they also discuss the absolute essential for self-education - you must love to read, if you don't, then stay in college where they will force you to read.

http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/...

Also, I would add, for technical fields you need to be interested enough in math to study it on your own as well.

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