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Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder why we lose the efficiency and intensity over time that we enjoyed in college. When in college, we took five pretty intense courses a semester. We didn't have to wait for "a big chunk of time" to work on our homework. Instead, we got tons done in library or in the computer lab in between classes. And we still managed to find time to date, to party, and to read volumes of fictions. Years having flashed by, and yet somehow I always find half an hour is too short for me to read something interesting, and it always takes more than I can admit to focus on what I want to learn. Yes, we have family and kids and etc so we have less time, but if I check my screen time, oh s%*t! I certainly have time for intense study, but somehow I manage to squander them on social media and what not.

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I can still do it when I hunker down and legitimately try, but you need to drown out distractions. I don't know how old you are, but graduating high school in the 90s, the Internet existed when I was in college, but no social networks, no targeted advertising, no attention economy, no smart phones. I didn't have a dumb mobile phone or even a television. If I want to learn as much as I learned back then, I need to remove those things from my life as much as possible. Leave the phone in my bedroom. Read physical textbooks and take notes by hand on paper, not on an electronic device connected to the web. If I'm reading papers/articles, print them out.

This is effectively isomorphic to the obesity epidemic. You can try to white knuckle it with sheer discipline or run 80 miles a week, and some people manage to do that, but mostly it's a matter of food environment. If you have a genetic predisposition to frequent snacking, typically the only way to avoid it in the long run is to not have shitty snack foods available to you at all. Expecting to just control yourself when the option is there not to usually doesn't work at some point. You can't binge on screen time if you have no screens around.

Even in the 1990s, I saw the phrase "academic suicide by Usenet". Some people got so pulled into keeping up with newsgroups that they'd neglect their homework, thesis, or studies. A stream of anything engaging is addictive.

> efficiency and intensity over time

I have a very different perspective of college than you. Some semesters I only had ~6 hours of classes on Tuesday and Thursday, so the majority of my time was spent not learning, but rather reinforcing through rote memorization (so-called "studying") and busywork (homework).

I don't think college is a good model for how to schedule and manage your life, because I don't think college is a good model for anything

Different styles of college? My college shaped me and what I learned carried me until today. Case in point, I don't think I would learn how to write a database engine, albeit a single-threaded one, from scratch with progressive difficulties, if my professors didn't design the course properly. I wouldn't be equipped with intuitive understanding of maths and stats that I can express using the proper language such as linear algebra, if it were not for the rigorous training given by college. I wouldn't be able to use queuing theory to analyze systems fresh out of college if it were not for tons of fun of studying queuing systems in college. I wouldn't have no difficulty picking up any programming language if it were not for the courses on programming language theories. I wouldn't even know the advanced mathematical logic and formal verifications and computability and a long list of other things if it were not for excellent teaching and unwavering demand from my professors. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to deeply appreciate English classics like The Great Gatsby and Mobi Dick, given that I could barely pass TOFLE when I went to my college, if it were not for the excellent and rigorous writing course given by a demanding lecturer.

I'm forever indebted to my college

Almost all of what I was presented with in college felt like a very slow motion way to learn the required material, most of which I had already taught myself via the internet. It felt as if reading the textbook and then creating a project at the end would have allowed me to finish the courses faster than having to survive through lectures for several hours a week.

Some classes were exactly like that: the professor taught straight from the book, so I stopped going to class and just read the textbook instead. I showed up for the finals and got an A (or turned in a project at the end of the semester and got an A)

But other than the CS classes, there was a ton of filler crap meant to line the pockets of the administrators. Various math and science, art, history and english classes wasted the vast majority of my first 2 years at college. If you were to cut out the filler and allow students more flexibility in how they learned, you could cut a bachelor's degree down from 4 years to 1 or 2.

However, I think that the excruciating length of college is a selling point: Americans who go to college are looking for an all-inclusive resort at which they can fuck each other's brains out while they defer the real world and adulthood for another 4 years, only becoming marginally useful to the world 6 months after graduating, when they've been fully de-programmed at their jobs of all the useless and incorrect information they were provided during their degree. I truly believe that most people go to college in an attempt to prolong their childhoods into their mid 20s.

College, to me, is just a bloated jobs program for middle management types to suck up tens of thousands of dollars per student in tuition while providing dubious value in return.

> I'm forever indebted to my college

I am, too, but not in the same way as you.

I remember when we were taking an algorithm course, the professor gave us a proof question on the CLR book. It's a property of universal hashing and it used to be a well known corollary. It took me multiple hours to crack the insight that led to the proof. That level of teaching - the ability to select the right problems to nail deep concepts and to push us to grow - is hard to come by if we teach ourselves. At least not for ordinary students like me.

My other issue with college, especially in CS, was the amount of theory classes we took. The vast majority of CS students just want to be software engineers; most CS theory is not useful for that goal

Strangely, I find theories, at least up to junior graduate level, amazingly useful in building systems.

It means they are still courses instead of seminars, and they are not necessarily cutting-edge research materials. Many of the courses are taught to senior undergrads too.

What does Junior Graduate level mean?

Some of that is age: schools are generally mostly for the youth(ful). Some efficiency is lost with age, that's just the unfortunate entropic nature of it all.

Some of that is nostalgia and beer goggles: we remember the good times and the grades that were recorded in our transcripts, but we forget the weeks of intense stress and the feelings of barely managing to juggle it all or hold it all together. We remember the parties fondly but forget how much those parties were designed to help us forget some of our struggles and drama before and after those parties.

You had a curriculum that those short bursts tied into. Some one else already did the organizational work - I think if you enrolled in a class now you'd similarly find the time.

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