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Comment by cbrinker | Hacker News Reader

Never heard of the guy before. I checked out his bio on Wikipedia and it says this:

"After being arrested for grand theft in Sacramento, CA and given 60 hours of community service, Steve claims that this was the impetus he needed to turn his life around. He claims to have earned two college degrees in three semesters from California State University, Northridge - he says that he partly achieved this by attending a college that was generous in awarding advanced placement credits for courses he had taken in high school, thus reducing his required course."

The citation links to his article where he claims he did 30-40 units per semester and no summer school. I don't know, that sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe he earned 2 degrees in 3 semester on technical subjets of mathematics and comp sci.

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I believe it, having done something similar. I got 2 degrees after spending 2 years at a 4 year college (plus 1 year at community college, I assume this is similar to his AP credit). It's not as hard as you think.

Math and computer science (or math and physics, in my case) have a lot of overlap. Intro courses (Calc 1-4, Physics 1-2, Chem 1-2, English 1-2, etc) are identical. Do a couple of course substitutions (Functional Analysis and Complex Variables == Math Methods for Physics Pt 1&2), and the work might only be 25% more. For me, 1 degree was 120 credits, 2 degrees was 150.

Another trick is to jump right into advanced courses. Quantum mechanics + organic chemistry (8 credits) is a lot of work. Quantum mechanics + organic chemistry + Chem 101 + Intro to Probability (16 credits) not double the work. In QM you derive energy levels for the Bohr atom, in Chem 101 you memorize them. 40 credits probably means 12 credits worth of difficult classes, and a bunch more where he shows up for tests and maybe crams for an hour beforehand.

I am a little dubious myself, but it seems doable, considering a couple factors: Steve was going to UC Berkeley before he got popped for that theft charge, CSUN is quite a bit lower on the pecking order than UCB (no offense any CSUN graduates!) Second factor is that if you don't do any partying, girl/boy chasing, don't have to take care of your family, don't have to hold a job, you have plenty of time to do a double/triple load of studying. Thing is most of us don't want to do that...

Never heard of you before. I checked your bio on Wikipedia and you don't have one. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe you're even a real person.

Casting aspersions on his character? Why? It's very hard for me to believe people can know enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Physics, but they do.

See: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstac... for how he did it.

I'm not the one going around claiming to have done certain things that are rather ridiculous to believe without seeing a legit degree and a student record. Forgive my skepticism.

There are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there that are going to sucker you in with their smooth words. Hey, if he writes about things and it helps you, that's great. Still doesn't convince me he graduated with 2 degrees in 3 semesters. It does convince me he knows how to make some money, though.

Even if you had nothing better to do in your life at that time, taking on 30-40 units is beyond a full time job. You'd litterally be looking at something like 60-80 hours of work a week. That's unreasonable by any standard. It's just like some other articles posted on here saying, working super long hours and little sleep isn't something that is productive or something worth bragging about.

Also, after reading through some of his articles he doesn't sound like a very logical person. I won't argue with results, but some things said on their don't exactly vibe with reason imo.

I notice I am jumping overly to his defense when I have no reason to other than that I like his writings.

Sometimes the character of a person casts doubt on what they say. Have you never heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?

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