Ask HN: How would you have done high school/college/university differently? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you have done high school/college/university differently?

28 pointsomosubi49 comments

Knowing what I know now, I would have approached high school and college much differently than I did. What would you have done differently? And if you think that your mistake was a common one, what would you change about the system to prevent others from making the same mistake?

For example I didn't take enough risks which I think hurt me in the long run. I'm not sure how to fix that for current and future students but thought the HN community might have some thoughts

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One thing that would have benefit me greatly in both High School and College is getting my ADHD diagnosed and my depression treated. I struggled with depression from my teens to my late twenties and it held me back a lot. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s and my life has been on a substantial upswing since.

Otherwise, in high school: Be more social and more active.

In university I would have also benefitted from not having to work many evenings and weekends. This would have helped my schooling and my social life substantially.

Being more willing to relocate for my summers to find good internships would have also been a huge help I think. As it was I had to find work with zero work experience when I graduated and I feel it slowed my career trajectory substantially.

Overall, balancing work and university just burned me out and set me on a path of feeling like my whole life would just be gainless toil for a long time. I feel my 20s were largely wasted on this attitude towards work and life. I would 100% recommend taking higher student loans and focussing on study and social life rather than study and work.

Even better would be if post secondary became provided by society.

>I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s and my life has been on a substantial upswing since

Is that to say you started medication, or just knowing about ADHD has helped you with this?

I'd say both. Medication is helping me substantially with getting things done and the knowledge that my brain has been working against me my whole life has helped me get over a lot of old insecurities.

I'd have gotten my GED, left high school early (ideally just avoiding it all together), taken my sweet ass time getting basic prereqs out of the way at community college (instead of trying to finish in 2 years with 6+ classes per day like everyone else), figured out what I wanted to do based on what I'm good at, and then go from there.

If I had done that, I would have become a professional software developer much earlier and have saved tens of thousands of dollars and nearly a decade of my life.

What actually happened was I spent high school learning to hate the system for its prison-like qualities, ended up rushing into an education for something I ended up discovering I didn't like and wasn't good at thanks to typical societal pressures of getting an education and "keeping up with your peers", and eventually I had to start my life from scratch in my mid-20s.

I'm just glad I didn't have to start over in my 30s or 40s.

If I could go back with what I know now, I'd be working full-time by age 19 and earning more than any of my peers, and my self esteem would have been much better by not forcing myself to do a bunch of work I hated in a short period of time for a goal I really had little aptitude or passion for.

Oh, and if we want to talk about education broadly, I would have played a lot less Halo and read more thought-provoking books about useful occult knowledge that no mainstream schools will ever teach. These are what I wish I had been reading by the time I left high school:

- 48 Laws of Power (and pretty much everything by Robert Greene)

- The books "Influence" and "Presuasion" by Robert Cialdini

- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F** by Mark Manson

- Left of Bang (Van Horne, Riley)

- No One Ever Told Us That (John D. Spooner)

Those books alone provided way more value than my entire high school education (which was really a retread of everything learned in middle school), and I'd have been way ahead had I read them much earlier. I'd have bypassed a lot of strife and wasted time which resulted from believing countless non-truths from the media and elders.

I would’ve spent less time trying to get perfect scores and more time trying to make friends and hang out with people.

Idk if that would’ve actually benefitted me in the long run. But i know if i was sent back to high school/undergrad now, with my academic interest/motivation lower and social skills improved, I would’ve don’t that.

Also in middle and high school i would’ve loved to take more advanced placement and higher-ed classes. I was lucky that school was easy to me, and the AP classes I took and knowledge i learned on my own gave me a head start in college. I’m uneasy about schools fading out “gifted” programs, sometimes they’re unfair, but there needs to be an opportunity for students who learn faster to place out of concepts they already understand into higher-level ones.

Yeah, I focused heavy on setting up my career while I was a teenager/young adult and has resulted in a very mediocre outcome.

I kinda figured a lot of the social stuff would just fall into place when I was an adult, and was dead wrong.

In HS, I would have had more extracurricular activities at least joined some less competitive sports like cross country - there is literally no other time in your life where you will have that kind of free time. I was basically a classic book nerd in HS - very high GPA and class rank but not much else.

In college, I graduated with an Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics degree in 2000. My passion was always software, but at that time almost everyone (in NE Ohio) was giving the advice that electrical engineering would be more lucrative in the long run. I literally read the phrase "the bud is off the blossom" when researching computer science in 1995.

I wound up never doing EE professionally, and have working in software since graduation.

In retrospect, I would have followed own instincts and studied philosophy and math with a minor in Comp Sci. I think the Com Sci minor would be sufficient from a technical side, math would have been a better prep for data science/ML, and philosophy is just good for building mental models and examining your beliefs.

Same. I wish I had been more involved in team stuff. Also wish I had at least checked out greek life in college.

I took 20 credit hours each semester to get 2 extra minors in addition to my degree.

I should have just focused on my core courses and use extra time to work on my soft & people skills.

Being ported back to my 16 year old body in the Carter era, I'd have done quite a few things differently. Knowing the next 42 years events would make you quite a lot less shy about choices.

I would have gone to the local University extension, and got a CS/EE dual degree. I would be tempted, of course, to skip that and go the Bill Gates route. For whatever reason, in the early 1980s, I wanted to be a programmer, but was ready to swear on a stack of bibles that programming would never be a way to make money. (Yeah, I was quite wrong about that).

Passing up the chance at a cheap college degree would be hard to do. I would have made and maintained all the friendships I could stand. There are so many wrong turns taken, and with a network of friends to help, a lot of those could be fixed.

One regret is not keeping a diary, regardless.

I would have taken more loans and spent more on entertainment.

I went through college very frugally and passed up many opportunities for trips, recreation, and novel experiences. I still did a lot, but did it on a DIY/ shoestring approach that naturally precluded many things.

In retrospect, time and opportunity are scarce, and money is replaceable. Having spent several thousand on activities would have literally no negative impact on my life.

This is a really interesting answer. Not a lot of people wish they had more debt.

When new graduates are saddled with debt, a lot of them feel like they have to take the highest-paying job that's on offer, and that ends up greatly narrowing their life direction. Don't you think that debt would have had similar effects on you?

Not everyone has the same employment or financial situation.

I think a lot of people are more fearful of debt than warranted, just like a lot of people are not fearful enough of debt.

For example, I know many people who wished they took on more debt to purchase homes when the market was cheaper, and deeply regret their choices.

A lot of students are saddled with oppressive debt, but a lot come out with manageable debt and high paying careers. If I had been more thoughtful, I should have identified myself in the latter group.

For me personally, I don't think a few thousand bucks would have had any impact whatsoever. I have a good job and could pay it off without blinking an eye. In my situation, sums like that are essentially irrelevant. These days I worry about things like million+ mortgages, and having enough time with friends and family.

High school: I would have tried to have more fun. A bit less emphasis on college prep and. Bit more emphasis on just being a kid.

College: I would have gone to a state school. Sure I got a reasonably good education at a private liberal arts college, but I could have gotten my sheepskin for less money and with subjective quality difference.

Here again - I was so focused on getting out into the world and making money, where I should have been working on becoming a more interesting person. Take that art class, take that dance class. Go to that kegger in the woods with your friends. Join the rec league basketball team, etc.

Wow. 180% from me.

HS: I’d have at least put in a bit of effort to get decent grades. My test scores (ACT, SAT) were much better than my grades implied. I had way too much “fun”.

College: a decent small liberal arts program would have been much better than a huge state school. This isn’t to say the education itself would have been better, but for me it would have been a much better atmosphere to succeed in.

Try.

I was always the smart kid. Got A-Bs without effort. I regret being lazy and not learning how to learn and work, and I wonder where I would be had I not goofed around so much.

You should check out this video:

Why Gifted Kids Are Actually Special Needs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E. It is a truly excellent video for helping to understand some of the psychological/emotional challenges of being "gifted."

Internalizing the ideas spoken to in this video has been a huge gift to my mental help. For a long time, I held it against myself that I didn't try harder in college, and that if I did, I would be in a much better place. The reality is that for kids who do extremely well in high school with little effort, doing poorly in college is the default response. It takes a major intervention to get and stay on the right path, and many "gifted" kids of the past generations never got that since it was assumed they were smart enough to figure things out on their own.

thanks for sharing this video.

Speaking for myself, I'm reminded by the advice about other people's advice to youth - it's not actually how I'd done it in my early 20's - but whatever I'm lacking currently at my current old age that I wish my younger-self would have put in the work to make it easier for me right now lol.

Like many others, I am feeling the money pressure as I get older; hence the advice to younger self just to graduate early and learn to save, invest and compound (never mind my younger self tried to chase the dollar and were constantly insecure about chasing internships and make the grades to do so). Like many others, I'm feeling more the social isolation and feeling stagnant as I get older; hence the advice to younger self to get out more and acquire more social and dating experiences (never mind how my younger self have tried and how the pushback were with how insecure, superficial and immature some people and I were back then with undeveloped pre-frontal cortices).

I'm reminded by how some thing that I've held in such high regard back then - has turned utterly meaningless and almost cringey with age. Like losing your virginity for the first time or penetrating into a summer internship at Faang or penetrating into a trendy clubbing for the first time (pun intended). Not these things weren't important but it's how much I chased and were haunted by these external milestones every hour and every minute and second - just like I'm now haunted in middle age on how to compound to multiple two commas net worth, FOMO about my friends professional accomplishment into high management, making out with real estate and/or family formation.

The things back then I do not regret and wished I had done more: learning and playing guitar, working at a genomics lab for all 4 years in school, spending time with friends and going to the beach.

1. I wouldn't have chosen Physics given that a great number of people with a degree end up in Data Science / Developer Roles, I would have chosen Computer Science or Medicine.

2. I would have stopped comparing myself to others since the first year of high school: I was almost always top of my class but the constant comparisons and fear to be a "loser" even for a single score have greatly contributed to my extremely deep depression; I can't find joy in my accomplishment: it doesn't matter how good I am.

3. I would have tried to be more physically attractive both for a health and social reason: I would have dropped all the b*it about interior beauty and focusing on having a good looking package to pass the initial first-impression, instinctive reaction.

4. I wouldn't have thought much about the future and how much I need to do everything right or else. It turns out that I do not have and will never have all the information to do the right choice in every given context and most of the good and the bad in life are happenstances, luck: our right choices are a nice narrative that we tell ourselves to make sense of the mess that it is existence.

5. I would have stayed a bookworm even if it was not cool: the cool kids turned out to be not so cool after all.

6. I would have started watching more anime in high school instead of being snobbish about it.

7. I would have tried to develop much more my interpersonal skills with people I was really interested about instead of the above-mentioned cool kids.

8. I would have dropped all the lofty multi-year goals and expectation and focused on small goals (at most 6-12 months-long goals) and create sustainable habits on the day to day mundane grind so that, when the realization that the goals were impossible would have hit, I would have been sustained by a healthy lifestyle instead of my big mess of a so-called life.

If I were to summarize your points, it would be to learn to be likeable while not caring about how others judge you beyond that; don't apologize for who you are, but look good and be personable.

> the cool kids turned out to be not so cool after all.

Hahaha

That is so true that it shouldn't be funny, but it still is.

Pretty much all the "cool" people from my public education experience ended up being incredibly low-tier once they got out of college. Like, disproportionately. A lot of them are currently living with their parents in their 30s and have no career at all. One guy who kept stealing from me that everyone thought was "gangsta" ended up in prison for a while. One of my former bullies became one of those smarmy 3rd-party tech recruiters! xD Although I don't necessarily wish bad things upon others, it's rather fitting that he ended up in a job where almost all of his clients actually hate him. :D

I wish I would have partied more in high school and studied more in college. I didn't learn until too late that getting into a good school (at least back in the late 90s) came mostly down to raw intelligence and a bit of luck. The competition wasn't nearly as intense as it is now.

In college, I partied too hard at a time when I really needed to buckle down and improve my study skills. As a result, I dropped out, joined the military, and wound up down a much different life path than my collegiate peers who stayed the course. Things worked out fine in the end, but I feel like I would have had a more personally rewarding path if I would have stayed in school.

>came mostly down to raw intelligence and a bit of luck.

That's not true it's always come down to how much money you have, and a bit of luck

Fair enough. Hard to argue with that.

I would’ve started earlier than that, more like birth to three, to set the stage for me approaching later education with more curiosity and willingness to fail. I do not blame my parents, mind. My hurdles are my own, and I’ve found Blindboy’s mental-health podcasts (CBT, transaction analysis, Rogerian psychology stuff) helpful along the way. Disassociating my sense of worth (self-esteem?) from my failures would be a big one towards a thorough working-through of challenges. I imagine myself working diligently like Teddy Roosevelt (an anecdote from Deep Work by Cal Newport, if I recall correctly) rather than procrastinating to hide from the fear of failure, judgement, and whatever else I haven’t figured out yet. I’d use Anki (or some sort of spaced-repetition system) daily, and I’d get to know as many people as I could, at least to break the ice, because who knows how we might help each other later on.

Slept with more people

Overrated.

Maybe worked a little harder? I cheated my way through some hard courses (e.g. physics), while others (e.g. differential equations) had very low bar for passing and now I sometimes feel it would be cool to know more about these subjects.

I never went to any school post HS and am actually putting together a plan to go go back (for a non CS degree).

As much as the current implement of higher is a pain in the ass for non-traditional students, I will say I’m almost certain I’ll be able to make more of it than I would at 17/18. I know what I want out of it, and I have a roughy idea of what to do try set myself up to get that and for the pieces I don’t know, where to go for help.

Had I gone at the normal age, I probably would have wasted my time doing the bare minimum for some CS program with little thought or strategy as what I really wanted to do afterwards.

1. Don't drop maths. I did well enough in first year to be placed in the "advanced" second year maths, where I suddenly found myself surrounded by math olympiads. Instead of doing the rational thing and transferring into the normal stream, I saved face by dropping second/third year maths because it wasn't required for my degree.

2. If you somehow have an idea where you want to live long term, go to university there. The friends you meet in university will be some of the best you have for life, and being able to keep living close by after graduation seems highly advantageous.

High school: More physical activity. I developed my mind only. I was a very fast runner and a good high jumper, without ever exercising, and I probably could have been some kind of track athlete. At high school age I had been bullied enough to think that sports were not for me, even if I was good at them. I think I should have tried.

College: I should have switched programs from journalism/communications to comp sci. At the time, I couldn't conceive of starting a university program all over again at the incredibly advanced age of 22.

I would have done almost no work, and slacked off at a low tier college. Programming and programming interviews are heavily intelligence based. None of my previous efforts mattered. It was all a waste of youth.

The more my interpersonal and networking skills improved, the easier it became to get work. We all need skills, but once you have enough skills to reach a figurative escape-velocity then pouring too much effort to qualify on-paper for things is more a waste of time.

1. I would have stuck to my computer science major instead of following everyone else.

2. I also would have chosen an university in a big city where there were more opportunities to network with industry professionals.

I'm just discovering how to take notes properly and extract and retain knowledge from books. I relied on my memory too much (literally cramming the before exams) and short form retention. My research and understanding skills are good. But I think I could have extracted much more of the 5 years I spent in college. I'm not fully sorry, as I was learning software engineering on the side. Just that my theoretical foundation could have been more solid, and maybe I would have worked on more personal projects.

Knowing what I know now, I'd have gone somewhere like Tennessee, made friends with people like Jack Dongarra in the HPC community by volunteering for the grunt work, talked my way into any kind of job I could get in that field, and skipped grad school. Course requirements might pose a distraction but luckily most courses can be gamed by memorizing things, so I'd cultivate my skills at spaced repetition.

Applied to better schools given lot of them have full need based scholarship if you get in.

Picked a major that is non-cs but studied cs books on my own.

Get GED, do an online college, i.e. WGU, and then get masters. All possibly in 3 years, stick to one language and master it. I'd be fulltime dev by 20.

Not go to commuter college, while saved me tons of money but it wasn't college experience.

Spend less time on gaming, anime, and youtube. Instead more on sports, building stuff and public speaking.

I’d have tried to learn to study before college. I aced high school with almost no effort and arrived at college completely unskilled at actually studying or working in a course, so I got my ass kicked by the coursework.

Secondarily, I mildly wish I’d done more off-major exploration into subjects that were impractical or unrelated to my major. (That’s 180° from other advice below, so maybe it’s just a grass-is-greener issue.)

I wish I had realized that my grades in college basically didn’t matter as long as I passed. I crucified myself trying to get straight As, and I don’t think it mattered much at all. Relatedly, I would have gone to a cheaper and less stressful college where I could have done well with less effort (a state school rather than private). I gather from the other responses here that this is a common sentiment.

Go to office hours.

Heh, this has been top of mind for me. Since graduating I haven’t paid any attention to my GPA and it’s been almost a decade but now I’m applying to grad school and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Also, despite my professors telling me about the unmatched resources we had available to us (compute clusters, hardware labs, etc) I didn’t pay much attention to it. I would use all the resources available if I got a re-do.

I would have made it a point to work out on a regular basis. I participated in sports in high school. Although I was not good enough to compete in college I could have continued to lift weights. It took me a good five years after graduation to begin lifting again and then Covid hit limiting my ability to lift until I bought a set of free weights and a power rack.

I studied 8 years to get 9 years worth of degrees.

In retrospect, I should have fast tracked the bsc computer science to 2 years, get work experience and then do the msc computer science in 1 year (fast tracked). I should have never started the psychology degree and game studies degree.

Perhaps both in the US in order to get OPT (US work visa).

Focus more on the core classes. Would try to understand the concepts more thoroughly not just to get good grade, but treating courses are things I will use daily at work and if I don't learn it now then I would have to spend more time in the future to learn them. For example, databases and networking.

I would’ve focused more, got my homework done (even when I didn’t want to). I enjoyed my time in high school and college, but I was a really lousy student. Given that the primary function of school is to learn and obtain the prescribed paper, I would’ve been more dedicated to that.

I would have skipped as much of high school as possible. Just enroll in a community college and graduate with a degree with a masters in a 3+2 program. School is largely a waste of time.

I'd have made it all about the networking

Turns out after 16 years of school.. I don't learn that way.

My only regret was missing out on the networking opportunities having dropped out

Don't drop math. Linear algebra seems important for a lot of things I'm interested in, and I never took it.

Treat your medical problems first would be my advice for my younger self.

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