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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

> I ended up going to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship.

I think compared to Boston, Pasadena or Stanford, Blacksburg is far more conducive to mental and physical health. And even without your scholarship, VA Tech is cheap, and absurdly cheap compared to you backup schools. Well done. Go Hokies.

FWIW my first choice was CMU, got in early acceptance, but my father's income prevented financial aide. It has increased since, but at the time CMU was $22K/semester while VA Tech in state tuition was $2500/semester. Rents are also much more affordable in SW Virginia than they are in Pgh (or Boston, Pasadena or Stanford). I looked at MIT, but I could not identify the campus; it was just city buildings. To me, Harvard reminded me of a penitentiary.

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> I think compared to Boston, Pasadena or Stanford, Blacksburg is far more conducive to mental and physical health.

And I agree. Blacksburg was certainly better for my mental health than Boston. But again, this all turns on what you want out of life. Mental and physical health are not the only things a person could possibly desire. If what you really want is to be on the bleeding edge of something like science and technology, and you're willing to endure some stress and physical discomfort in order to achieve that, then Boston is probably a better place to be. This is why figuring out what you really want is really important and really hard.

Case in point for me: what I really want out of life is freedom: not being beholden to anyone, being able to do whatever I want whenever I want to. I've more or less achieved that, but it comes at a cost: I have no children because if you have children then you are beholden to them (or at least you should be). I have absolutely no regrets about this, but obviously many people want children more than they want freedom, and that's probably a good thing or we'd go extinct. Different strokes for different folks. That plus a free market is what makes technological civilization work.

> If what you really want is to be on the bleeding edge of something

Sure, but I don't think undergraduates are really bleeding edge participants, more like a necessary evil for bleeding edge participants.

If your goal is to be on the bleeding edge, the best way to get there is to forge relationships with people who are already there. There are many more opportunities to do that at MIT or Stanford than Virginia Tech. The actual education you get is very much a secondary consideration.

I just disagree fundamentally with what you are floating. Undergraduate educations (meaning where the degree is awarded) could not matter less if continuing to graduate level education, and yet what is learned during undergraduate studies is pretty important. If you don't learn Calculus, and get decent grades doing so, you're not going to be able to get a Masters in Math or CS because you won't get accepted into the program. Though I know of seniors planning on graduate education becoming more active in a department, maybe getting an internship to make photo copies and coffee, I've never really heard of undergraduates "forging relationships" with faculty, at least not beyond a particular semester course. Take two students, all things being equal, but one goes to MIT and learns a lot and ingratiates themselves to faculty, but gets B grades, while the other goes to NC State, ignores faculty, parties for 4 years, but gets straight A's... guess which will be accepted into an MIT graduate program? Grad schools are not political. Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity. Unfortunately, academic merit is based on grades, which are evil, and not based on whether you graduated from Yale or Mountain Springs Community College.

> If you don't learn Calculus, and get decent grades doing so, you're not going to be able to get a Masters in Math or CS because you won't get accepted into the program.

> Grad schools are not political. Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly naive.

I entered Virginia Tech with enough AP credit to enter as a sophomore, and within one quarter I was a Junior. I finished my B.S.E.E. in 8 quarters with a 3.9+ GPA (I don't remember exactly what it was, but my diploma says Summa Cum Laude.) It took three calendar years because I did two six-month co-op stints at IBM during that time (this was back in the early 80s when IBM was still a cool place to be.) All that was not enough to get me in to MIT or Stanford as a grad student despite the fact that both had accepted me as an undergrad.

Then, when I was a masters student (at Virginia Tech) I served as the student representative on the admissions committee. I went on to a 13-year-long research career at JPL in what was essentially an academic position without teaching responsibilities. I made my living publishing papers, and by the numbers I was very good at it. At one point I was the most referenced CS researcher in all of NASA, and I held that title for many years after I stopped publishing. I've seen first-hand how the sausage is made. So I can tell you from first hand experience it is intensely political. That is one of the reasons that I quit. I realized that I was getting a lot more leverage out of playing politics than I was out of actually doing good technical work. I got very, very good at gaming the system, and I hated it, so I quit.

I got very, very good grades in all my math classes. In my entire career I have never once had to do an integral or solve a differential equation. By way of very stark contrast, I use my social skills every single day. Those were a lot harder to develop because there wasn't a class I could take. But they have proven vastly more useful in day to day life than math.

The biggest mistake I have ever made in my life is taking much too long to realize that the aphorism that "who you know is more important than what you know" is actually true.

> All that was not enough to get me in to MIT or Stanford as a grad student despite the fact that both had accepted me as an undergrad.

Maybe it was just that year you applied there was stiff competition. That's called a counter-example and it negates your anecdotally supported argument that, paraphrasing, "good scholastic performance is not sufficient to make graduate acceptance," because maybe that year, every acceptant had better grades.

> The biggest mistake I have ever made in my life is taking much too long to realize that the aphorism that "who you know is more important than what you know" is actually true.

I think your biggest mistake may be believing in false things when I can tell you know better. Paranoia may be symptomatic. Your career sounds pretty amazing, so if that just isn't enough for you, that would make two symptoms of something. The most difficult thing one can do is humbling oneself for professional evaluation. If this suggestion is offensive, that's three symptoms.

To avoid mincing words, who you know does not matter. What you say also does not matter. All that matters is what you do, the choices you make, the actions you take, the work you do. You can not know someone by who they know. You only know someone if you know what they have done.

> Maybe it was just that year you applied there was stiff competition.

Yes, that's possible. It's also possible that all of the other experiences that I have had during my decades-long career, all of which have supported my conclusion, have all been aberrations or part of an elaborate conspiracy.

But I'll give you long odds against.

> All that matters is what you do, the choices you make, the actions you take, the work you do.

OK, I'm not going to try to dissuade you from this. If that approach works for you, then more power to you.

> If that approach works for you

I'll admit I'm speaking more broadly than graduate acceptance when I say what matters is what you do, not who you know, because in the grand scheme of things, who you know is incidental, but what you do is foundational and defines who you are. So it is not a matter or whether it works for me, this is instead just how it is. If we knew you murdered someone, we'd know you were a murderer. If we knew you built rockets, we'd know you were a rocket scientist. It all we knew about you was that you were a friend of a professor that got you into your graduate program, we could not possible think much at all of you. I choose to believe you are a rocket scientist.

But none of these things are true. You are wrong about all of it.

> If we knew you murdered someone, we'd know you were a murderer.

That's a tautology. Imagine if I were accused of murder. Do you not think that you would be more inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt that I might be innocent if you knew me than if I were a stranger?

> It all we knew about you was that you were a friend of a professor that got you into your graduate program, we could not possible think much at all of you.

What if the professor told you that I was worth admitting? Would you not lend credence to their assessment?

> I choose to believe you are a rocket scientist.

Why? Because I said I worked at NASA? How do you know I'm telling you the truth? Even if I am telling you the truth, how do you know that I got my position at NASA on my merits? For the record, I did not. I got it because I knew someone. And the person I knew got their position because they knew someone.

This is not to say that I was unqualified, or that my boss was unqualified, or that we got our jobs purely because of nepotism (though that does happen as well). The situation was that JPL was actively recruiting people, and one of the department heads recruited my boss because they were grad students together at Yale, i.e. they knew each other, and my boss was my Ph.D. advisor, and so he recruited me because he knew me.

Personal connections give you access to opportunities that you would not otherwise have had (might not have even been aware existed) and the benefit of the doubt if you screw up. It's not like you can just go have a beer with a professor and get in to Stanford without doing anything else. But personal connections tilt the scales very heavily in your favor, and vice versa.

If you just want to skate through life on the coattails of doers, that's up to you. But I think the time is long overdue that you hunkered down and grew up. Hope you can appreciate inappropriate sarcasm.

You've reminded me of an anecdote told to me by a relative from a previous generation. He said a friend bragged to him he could get 250 people on the street just by making 10 phone calls. The relative told him he could do the same with just one call. His friend asked him how. He told him, "I'll call you."

We're not actually in the same argument. Who you are has very little to do with who you know. Who you are is what you have done. Hopefully in the distant future, your obituary will give a summary of what you have done, then list your surviving immediate relatives. It may detail an occasion of you meeting someone notable, like a President. But an obituary will rarely if ever list the people you know because who you know is incidental and an accident of fate. And chances are pretty good if these influential people you know have advanced your career, it is probably because of what you have already done and not because you incidentally are acquainted with them.

And what have you done?

[crickets]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

> I've never really heard of undergraduates "forging relationships" with faculty, at least not beyond a particular semester course.

Which means you never did any research for a professor, or know anyone who did. At MIT there's no less than official two programs for that, the main one with very substantial financial incentives.

There's an old saying about MIT that's relevant, "Undergraduates are treated like graduate students, graduate students like junior faculty, and tenured professors like gods." It exaggerates some but it most certainly gets the first bit right, undergraduates are assumed to be capable of graduate level research. "seniors planning on graduate education becoming more active in a department, maybe getting an internship to make photo copies and coffee" is just not how it works at MIT, that's work for MIT's generally very capable office staff.

And thus if you use the research method in "'forging relationships' with faculty" perhaps after acing a course they taught, and you do well, you'll get the inherently political but not in a really bad way "in" to graduate programs when your professor tells a professor who knows your professor that you can do research, as discussed elsewhere.

What you're claiming makes it sound like seeking graduate acceptance requires manipulation and only nepotism guarantees acceptance. Other people are not a means to an end but instead the ends themselves. I don't see anything wrong with a friendship with a faculty member, but you make it sound as though the right way to do things is to have an agenda for getting a faculty member's attention so that they might "put in a good word" with their faculty friend at some graduate department to grease the tracks of acceptance.

Certainly, relationships are important, but they're only valuable if they're genuine, a two-way street, and not one-sided. What possible incentive would a faculty member have to invalidly get an undergrad accepted to some grad program? Just because they like them? What do they get out of it? This all brushes very close to psychological egoism and narcissism.

Of the 20M or so undergrads at any one time, what percentage of them are doing graduate level work? Some... I took graduate seminars as an undergrad. It's not all that unusual, but whatever an undergrad does, even at MIT, is for the exercise, the experience of doing it, and not for pushing the state of the art and publishing articles. Even if an undergrad does publish in a journal, it is going to be clear the purpose of the exercise was the experience of doing that work, and not advancing the field. Undergrads think they know everything. Grad students know they know nothing. PhD's know everyone else knows nothing.

> but whatever an undergrad does, even at MIT, is for the exercise, the experience of doing it, and not for pushing the state of the art and publishing articles.

I'm sorry, but we're running into a brick wall of your viewpoint of the capabilities of all undergraduates which does not match what happens at MIT or any other research university which also formally or informally has undergraduates or even high school students perform grad student level research.

I was in a NSF Summer Science Training Program in the 1970s and real research was an integral part of it, I did grunt labor a lab tech or beginning grad student would do, but learned a great deal about the general field from the Principle Investigator (PI, the professor who ran the lab) and the senior grad student who I directly worked under. In return they got free labor and payed their debts forward to the people who originally mentored them.

Move from eight man weeks in that program to what can be done at MIT in up to four months a year full time for pay, plus whatever can be squeezed in when classes are in session and you get paid in credit, and the system can easily turn out a mid-level or higher grad student equivalent with enough work under his belt to be in real papers published by legitimate journals that wouldn't be what you describe above. And be the basis of a very legitimate recommendation, grad students who turn out not to be able to do research are a messy loss to a department and the professor who finds this out the hard way.

We have no basis for discussion so this will be the end of my replies, but there's at least one other discussion on this system in this topic, and it's common enough knowledge in academia.

> In return they got free labor

For one, it sounds like you might be placing undo value on your grunt labor. But more importantly, it sounds like you don't see that you made out on the deal, and they got the short stick of your grunt labor.

> We have no basis for discussion so this will be the end of my replies,

It would have been more honest of you to admit you're annoyed at dissent, and don't wish to discuss further, but instead, passive-aggressiveness.

Be well.

Please don't selectively quote, the full sentence is "In return they got free labor and payed their debts forward to the people who originally mentored them."

> Graduate acceptance is based on merit, not popularity.

For common people, yes. I know first-hand people who are very politically connected who went into and graduated from MIT, who are dumb as a rock. With enough money and connections, nothing else matters.

> I know first-hand people who are very politically connected who went into and graduated from MIT, who are dumb as a rock. With enough money and connections, nothing else matters.

I've watched how MIT "processes" undergraduate students all the way through graduation, and this would require corrupting the Registrar's office to create a fake transcript and adding names to the list of graduates after the departments and that office submit their perfected lists to the people who handle the details of graduation.

It's theoretically possible, but strikes me as unlikely unless those rocks can do and apply the calculus; are you really sure that's beyond them?

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