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Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

Well good luck then, in my experience the most free time I've ever had in my life was during college. I squandered massive amounts of that time doing things completely unrelated to education, and I definitely don't regret doing that. College isn't just about book learning after all. But still, BY FAR, college is the time of my life when I had the most free time to do whatever I wanted.

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Yeah I hardcore disagree with this. Partly my fault for saying yes too much, partly my work schedule, partly being in a weed out program that really worked you to the bone.

Some semesters I was doing like 70-80 hours a week on average, split between managing clubs, homework, attending class, working part time jobs, studying. One week I remember being busy from 7am to 2am for 6 days straight. a few semesters I had a lot of free time, like second semester of senior year, and first semester of freshman year, but mainly it was the gaps - after midterms, during breaks, where I had obscene amounts of free time.

This was also my case... but tbh. I was the only one of the many thousands I met in the university...

Interesting. I had a very different experience. Double major, working in two labs simultaneously, active member of local ACM, interned with local startup during the school year, volunteered at a local soup kitchen. All that together was about 50 hours/week. Academics (including homework, studying, etc) was only 25 hrs/week on average. But I was very fortunate to have the advantage of not needing to work, which gave me the freedom to scale back my hours on a particularly busy week.

I learned a lot from my CS classes, but I actually felt like most of the value from the degree came from overhearing random chitchat between professors or other students and the reading more about those ideas and experimenting with them in my free time.

I had quite a lot of free time when in college, but I still feel like I had less time to pursue my interests. Reason being that the course itself was intellectually demanding while also being quite prescribed about what you had to learn. Meaning I ended up using all my mental capacity grinding through a bunch of stuff that my professors wanted me to learn, leaving me with much less time to go off and learn what interested me.

Both before and since I've had more free capacity to pursue learning for it's own sake.

Middle and high school is where a lot of students learn to stop being curious due to a lack of time. College demands far fewer hours per day, but it can be hard to forget what was taught previously.

idk, college for me demanded a lot more hours per day than middle and high school, not less

I have to agree with you. So many of my professors have been vocally disappointed with their students for their lack of intellectual curiosity after it had been beaten out of them through the overstuffed schedules and pointless busy work of K–12.

If you are someone who is on the cusp of a better grade at university then any curiosity time is better invested in restudying the past exam papers. I think PhD has more of a curiosity culture at least in the first year but I never did one.

Also hard subjects at uni - there is only so much deep thinking you can do per day

It depends on your courseload that semester. When I was taking organic chemistry I would spend a good 8 hours in the library a day monday-thursday on top of class, which would open the weekend up for partying. Wake up at 10 for class at 11, then straight to the library with the occasional break for meals or other classes until 11pm or so, whenever I got too tired to continue. By my senior year when I was just taking interesting electives, I was totally coasting, probably throwing in 2 hours a week in the library in total.

My sense is that your program at school had a light work load - so a difference in experience. My peak workload so far in my life was at college - I had over 40 hours of class time a week which you then have to add on homework, projects and exams. It was a grind.

Since then workload has been intense of course but never comparable. I've had much more time to be able to explore personal interests since college.

That's at least 3 times a normal amount of class time in the U.S. at places such as Ivy League colleges, MIT, etc.

40 hours of class time a week is absurd

Where did you study? I was working full time while doing the university... It was HARD... but I was nowhere nearly 40Hs of class a week... unless you do the whole university in 2 years?!

Yeah, I wish I'd had "free time" in college. 60-70 hour work weeks were normal - 20 hours a week in class and then a full-time load of courseworks / readings / labs etc. I couldn't afford to take time off on weekends for the first 3.5 years. It was horrendous.

Once I started full-time work it was like a revelation - finally I don't have to work on evenings and weekends! I actually get free time to myself! I can have hobbies!

That’s impressive. Between work (30 hours a week) and classes (full time credit load), I’ve never had less free time than when I was in college. And I’m speaking now as someone with 2 young kids and a full time job. Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience. Perhaps you didn’t have a full time job or only took part time credits?

> Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience.

I know very few university students with significant work commitments.

In the US, the stereotypical college student is not also holding down any kind of job. Maybe 5-7 hours of "work study" (light work running the reference desk at the library or working in the dining hall).

Frankly, I doubt the majority could do learn a lot and also work a significant number of job hours.

At a community college, it would be very different - most students also holding down jobs, I would guess. At a flagship state university, I would be very suprised.

Evidence in [1]... about 30% of full time students are working 20+ hours/week. Also apparently I was wrong about the low hours being typical; less than 10% are working but < 10 hours/week.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_ssa.pdf

Yeah, this. I don't have any data to support this, but when I was in school, MOST people didn't have close to full-time jobs. I had a job where I probably worked 10 hours during the week at night and some full 8 hour shifts on the weekends. Most of the people I went to school with (and I would assume, maybe wrongly, that most people in better schools than I went to) didn't work AT ALL while they were in school, it was just those of us less than wealthy folk who actually had to work to have spending money and money to pay for books etc. I don't think my work load was overly demanding, but I was a Comp Sci major, fwiw.

Happy to be wrong here. It sucks to think I had the standard experience given how difficult and draining it was.

Sounds like you weren’t in a competitive program that constantly tried to get people to drop from college altogether.

I was. Didn’t have anywhere near the free time and the lack of stress I do post-college. Helps that I also make a good chunk of change rather than living off a relatively small stipend in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

This was true for my undergrad, but my graduate program demands almost all of my free time, including weekends. Although, this may mostly be due to a drastic change in field of study from the two (social science to computer science) where I probably have to dedicate more time than those that already have knowledge/experience in this field.

Same. Even with a full course load and working over 40 hours a week.

No kids, no sports, no community involvement, no side hustles, no expectations.

Not my experience at all. Proper studying takes a lot of intense work, far more than I've ever needed to put in in my post-graduation working life.

We’re you working whilst you were in college?

I worked 10-15 hours a week (and somewhat more in the Summer) for about three years of college and can confirm, still the most free time and lowest stress ever. Worst, by a mile, was high school, and I even had a pretty good experience there. Far worse than working a full time job while having multiple young kids, even. Worse than before we had kids but when we made very little money and struggled to pay the bills every month. High school is terrible.

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