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> Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms.

100% agreed. I took a year out to work in software before University. Despite being completely disregarded by employers, it changed my perspective on independence, time management, and the risk of not making the most of opportunities. It's one of the best life decisions that I've made.

It would seem better to do as many hard, high investment (i.e. time and energy), high risk of failure but high reward things as young as possible while still having a societal protection blanket of "that's impressive for a high schooler". No one expects much from a high schooler so if your "exploration" (startup, project, etc.) hits a bump - you can recover quite easily and just re-join the mainstream. "Explorations" after graduation can look like unemployment to potential employer.

Also with today's plethora of online education available there's unlimited amount of options for exploration. In fact going deep application domain wise before college can be a great way to motivate deeper study of theory once in college. Imagine being a high schooler today mucking around with tensor flow apis. Once you get to college all those black magic random functions (i.e. predict(), fit()) you were calling in the Google tutorials will all of sudden make sense.

I did something like that, but I never stopped. Software doesn't need a degree, and I realized I wasn't interested in the debt. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm enjoying making my own way so far.

I would implore some form of higher studies though. Not all college is a waste, and even within software, putting your focus towards a topic and doing a PhD is life changing in terms of giving you more structure. The world needs smart people to guide it in all directions. Too many of them are now being wasted moving money around and showing ads.

I focus heavily on continuing education, as schedule and energy allow.

Software, plumbing, and car mechanics don't need a degree. They are technician work.

However, if you can have a much more fun life if you have a deep understanding of things like signal processing, image processing, differential equations, control systems, dynamics, etc.

Those let you do things like building medical imaging systems, autonomous robots, or deep learning systems. They're much more intellectually fulfilling than just coding, which loses its charm after a bit. You're also not competing against low-cost coders, which isn't a problem in the current market, but economies are cyclical. When the next recession comes, having more specialized skills is more helpful.

These do require mentorship, guidance, and some form of study.

As much as coming into university straight out of high school is often a bad idea, so is skipping it altogether.

The key problem is these aren't skills you can pick up incrementally. They take years of focused study. For example, you can't learn control systems without diff. eq. which in turn requires calculus. There's little immediate reward to learning calculus and diff eq, and little way to know what's important without expert guidance.

You assume I have interest in those deeper aspects, which I don't. I enjoy my work, but it's just a job to me. I stay up-to-date and develop my skills, but I have a life outside of work, and generally stay away from writing code in my other endeavors.

+1 to this, there are a large number of low cost opportunities for 16-22 year olds that become orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive later in life.

Notable examples include taking a year off to hike the AT or PCT. Volunteering in peace corps or americorps. Working in a different country, or working in a resort/tourism community.

Later in life taking such actions will put a major dent in your career ambitions and finances, but early in life it’a much easier to avoid the question “what were you doing between X and Y”

I skipped the last year of High School; I took (and passed) the California High School Profeciency exam as soon as a I could, but was convinced to stay one more year and they made the credits work to get me a degree. Then I did two years of Community College and got an AS before transferring to an out of state 4-year engineering college (where it took me three more years to get a BS, because the curriculum weren't aligned). Community College felt a lot nicer than high school, and the two years of college experience made it easier to manage living in the dorms and later with my not-yet spouse. Having almost all of my humanities already taken care of was nice too. Having a gap in hard Math classes wasn't great though; having swapped that information out, it was hard to page it back in.

I think it’s both true that most people do a lot of growing up at university and that it can make the experience worse if you are younger than everyone.

From a U.K. perspective one issue is that many student things generally assume everyone will be over 18 and therefore able to enter places that serve alcohol and only admit people over that age. Even if you don’t want to drink you may still be barred from participating. But this might not be such a big deal in the U.S.

If you’re only interested in your studies and you excel at them then maybe things don’t matter so much but I think for most people, university is mot so much about learning the subject you are reading as it is about being socialised into the middle class, and this is harder to do if you come in with one hand tied behind your back.

College in the US is usually about getting a piece of paper in order to be a nurse or teacher or accountant or social worker or civil servant. At many schools,, people show up for class and go home. Nobody cares what age you are and it is a service.

I think this is a fairly cynical, narrow take. There are a lot of schools and a lot of people in them doing more than a handfull of degrees.

I think the college experience in the US varies pretty widely depending on what sort of college you are at what you are studying, and your own attitude. An average state school, a small liberal arts college, an MIT/caltech, business school at Yale or Harvard. These will all be vastly different experiences.

And if you don't do one before college, ABSOLUTELY do one after if you're doing grad school, no matter what anyone tells you.

I'm going to guess that many (probably not most, but many) of us here come from a tradition where education is paramount and deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.

> deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.

Sometimes it is because they co-signed 6 figures of student loans.

> come from a tradition where education is paramount and deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.

Definitely true for me as I was reading this thread, so thank you for making this a bit more relatable in my mind (and those of others, I'm sure).

Yeah, in my case it was like "okaaaay so you're gonna have a job?" Ended up being two, no "travel the world" at the time or anything like that, more the opposite...

I'm in my mid-40's now, but I swear to you I have never felt older in my life then that time nearly 20 years ago; After a completely awkward TGI Friday's dinner, I'm in my hotel room in Miami. Instead of being out visiting friends which I had planned weeks earlier, at the last minute the boss decides we should go over the powerpoint a one-hundred and SIXTH time.

The first day of grad school was DELICIOUS after that.

So if you could go back in time would you take a gap year?

In general I think freshmen / sophomores don’t take enough advantages & don’t understand the professional implications of their time in college.

I skipped a year in elementary school and had a gap year (because I was in Israel I couldn't start university because I was supposed to do mandatory military service, and had a year to wait). Man oh man, did this year suck. I had no skills to manage myself with no routine, all my friends were a year older than me and started their military service. I worked for a few months, but then I just did nothing for what seemed like an eternity: I slept during the day, I was alone most of the time, internet was a couple years away so I didn't even have that, I honestly can't remember what I did but it was terrible.

This was how 2020 was for me. It was awful, and I never want to feel that way again.

I did have a plan for how to spend that time in a way that was meaningful, but COVID trashed it and I was left with nothing.

Yes - actually I had just finished editing my post to say that. For me at least I think it would have made a major difference. You are absolutely correct - I still sometimes kick myself over stupid decisions I made as a freshman and sophomore.

>I still sometimes kick myself over stupid decisions I made as a freshman and sophomore.

You and every other single human on the planet ;-)

Yeah. It’s not like being 18 rather than 16 transforms you into this somber mature freshman.

Just to chime in with the other experience- due to a bout of mono, I had to repeat 7th grade. I was already young for the grade, and as we had just moved stateside, I was having trouble integrating socially.

The repeat year was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was finally with my age-peer group, was appropriately socially aware, and just had a better scholastic experience across the board for the rest of my early education. I completely agree that much of early education is simple life experience, and it does the academically-gifted students no favors to push speed at the expense of everything else.

If it helps, you probably would fuck up your freshman and/or sophmore year anyway. Growing like that is an important part of the college experience.

Think about starting college at 20, though.

The people I have met who went back to school later in life (e.g., some years of military service first) had it together in a lot of ways that aren't likely for an 18 year old.

* Managing adversity

* Deeply engaging with issues they care about

Now I understand the search for self-identity is important, and college _can_ be a place to develop that. There are other ways to develop that don't involve paying $$$ as you try to balance personal emotional and intellectual development.

I think the education received for money spent isn't as high at 18 as it would be a few years later.

College is wonderful for some, maybe even a lot of the posters here.

But honest question, for people who have done college and graduate school: how do the first 2 years of college & graduate school compare in terms of focus, intellectual reward, depth personal relationships? I'm not saying it's 100% better later in life (graduate school), but ... I would be very interested to hear peoples' takes on this.

The thing is, absent going into the military, there isn't really another system set up to help people become mature. A gap year works, if you can afford it. But unless you have a strong plan, it can accidentally move to a gap two years, and possibly never going back to school.

I would agree with you in general about a gap year before college- but mostly from the perspective of it's a great time in life to be responsibility-free and do something meaningful

I think everyone is immature/makes poor decisions/could have chosen better paths their first couple of years in college regardless of age of matriculation. The first time you live with little supervision, have to start thinking about a career, etc. is going to be rough regardless of whether you are 17 or 20 because it is all such a new experience

I agree, but I suspect that there is a good chance that a long essay or a short book could provide a lot of that needed learning and growing up. I could contribute several paragraphs of what I wish someone had told me when I was in the first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, a freshman in college, etc., told me about girls and women, love, home, and marriage, organizational behavior, the economy and careers, politics, etc.

Heh. I skipped eighth grade, was young for my class anyway with a late year birthday, and also went to MIT.

Yes, I was young for college but it’s not like college students as a whole are these mature individuals. Was probably for the best overall.

Honestly, MIT is probably a better place than most for individuals who are maybe a bit atypical relative to other places.

Increasingly, you can replace "is" with "was."

Over time, MIT's acceptance of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, has waned. Right now, it's the top university brand in the world. That's a tightrope political game to play, and MIT optimizes to it very well. It's been a slow process for many decades, but it's really accelerated recently.

I'm not sure what the better schools are now. I've heard good things about Georgia Tech.

We do need nerd camps and nerd schools still. The old MIT was awesome.

> I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there

I skipped eighth grade, and I feel the same way.