Kids, take your college more seriously | Hacker News Reader

Kids, take your college more seriously

old.reddit.com

41 pointsredbell39 comments

Sometimes I think about how I should have worked harder and paid more attention to my courses while in university. My grades were pretty good (though could have been better), and I put effort into my projects and labs, but I feel that I didn't use my time well and didn't explore the opportunities, whether it was taking different courses, attending events, or finding like-minded people with whom I could have created something together, or even reading more books and studying a little more. After all, it was quite a short period of time, and after that, life just went downhill anyway.

It’s so hard to get college exactly right. Part of the point is to make a bunch of mistakes and learn from them

Yep. Unfortunately it’s cost-prohibitive for most people.

I still make mistakes decades later. I suppose the mistake will stop when the learning stops.

My advice to University students: find something that engages you. Do that to nearly the exclusion of everything else. Become one of the most enthusiastic knowledgeable people in that field.

Being a generalist will get you some kind of job, sure. But being good at something in particular can get you further.

I think a better formula would be to become a generalist, and then specialize in one thing deeply. Talking from experience within my circle of friends, the guys who specialized well ended up getting FAANG level jobs, but the guys who were "generalized specialists" were building great companies - doing what they wanted to do. If ever their passion company were to fail, they could always take comfort in being a generalist and hence being employable still (one of my friends is currently going through this stage after his well-funded startup crashed). A specialist would not be easily able to take that kind of monumental risk so easily.

I’m still trying to figure out how one becomes a “generalized specialist”. I would seem that once you establish yourself as a generalist, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve specialization.

I think a better formula would be economic rather than philosophical: find a job that pays a lot of money whether you like it or not, then establish your career in something you're passionate about regardless of how lucrative it is

It's a fun style of advice-giving

> then establish your career in something you're passionate about regardless of how lucrative it is

Yeah this is the part I’m stuck at. You can’t just “establish your career in something you’re passionate about”, lucrative or not.

Think of it this way: good at everything, great at this one thing. It takes time and dedication, generally outside work hours.

My experience is no one gives a shit if it happens outside of work hours. Maybe if you can establish yourself to pseudo-celebrity status within the particular niche?

No no, hone your skills outside of work, but use them at work.

But there’s still the problem. If you established you career doing X and you’re preferred niche is Y, you aren’t going to get to use Y at work because it’s simply irrelevant to you’re career doing X.

Let’s say in a run of the mill enterprise web developer, but I have an interest in a particular niche, say low level network programming or game development. I can hone my skills in the latter all I want, but I’ll never get the chance use them at my day job and I’ll never get a job working in that nice because they’re only interested in already established professional experts.

I'll put it another way. Leadership skills and communication skills are mostly a generalized skillset, but they're pretty important in any job, however specialized it is. Financial management is a skill that's kind of generic and commodities, but still important and definitely buildable if you want to start a company.

A generalist is better for starting a company because they can just get all the parts moving themselves, or pick up wherever the slack is. A specialist can get a specific and better paid job at a bigger company.

As a generalist you risk never getting anything off the ground, and being useless to people hiring because what they want is the specialist.

As a specialist you risk your specialization becoming obsolete, leaving you with nothing. You also risk picking an oversaturated specialization, or one that leaves you in a dead end role that pays less and less over time.

I think the job market for software developers is so much different now than it was, say, 8 years ago, that I'd probably advocate for becoming a specialist over a generalist. Getting your first job and making those initial connections will help you immensely in your career. But it's a tough call, both paths are very difficult and either way can work out if you're very persistent. And whichever path you choose is more likely to introduce you to like-minded people

I'm a generalist with a specialty. I'm paid to move fast as a generalist and no one gives a hoot about my specialty. My day-to-day would be much more comfortable if I were paid to flex my specialty.

Specialization is for insects.

Counterpoint- becoming the best in a field is nearly impossible. Even the top 10% is incredibly difficult. Being the best of knowing two fields… surprisingly easy. Eg Becoming the a top Software Engineer? Difficult. Becoming one of the world’s best at Civic Engineering software engineering or Financial Accounting Software Development? Probably pretty doable.

I am a graduate student and I TA for various professors' undergraduate classes in a STEM, but not engineering, field.

After spending about a decade outside of academia, I wonder about the phenomenon of class attendance dropping off as the semester or quarter progresses. Previously, I would have chalked this up to students being irresponsible etc. And while there are certainly cases of this happening, and 18-22 year olds aren't finished (psychologically) maturing... I wonder if one reason for the drop-off in student attendance is simply that students don't perceive certain classes to be that valuable for them / their goals / the rest of their life. I know a few undergrads who have taken graduate level seminars and are struggling to get their first job. Some professors who have no experience outside of Academia aren't exactly equipped to impart deeper wisdom.

As a recent university graduate, yes you're exactly right. I know plenty of people who'd skip class in order to grind Leetcode or job interview prep or whatever. It did make it so CS students in general were less passionate about their subject than my peers in other subjects.

I wish I had taken it seriously and gone… actually I’m not sure.

I had a different attitude coming out of high school, I was more naive and arrogant, and probably wouldn’t have made much of it.

If I could go back now, though, I have a much clearer idea of what I would want out of it, and what I could get out of it, and how to take advantage of it, unfortunately that’s not possible anymore.

Similar experience here. Coming out of high school, my head just wasn't in the right place to take advantage of college on any level and it'd be another 10-15 years with all of the accompanying life experience before that'd change.

Part of this I'm sure has to do with how high school is structured (its almost total absence of practical examples for using what was being taught was a huge damper on my interest in it, for example), but there's also just so many other things on a young adult's mind competing for attention that it's no wonder many students struggle.

> its almost total absence of practical examples for using what was being taught was a huge damper on my interest in it, for example

Ag yes, notably, I just could not care about calculus when I was in high school. I understood it had practical users, but at the time it just seemed far away from me I couldn’t bring myself to care. Flash forward years later and I find myself interested in problems where that knowledge might have actually been useful.

Also couldn't care less about math in school, until it came time to write game engine stuff. I learned trig so fast, and it made intuitive sense because I could directly model it in my game. Same with matrix math.

Kids have a hard time handling abstract concepts, especially boys whose brains develop slower and for a longer period.

Can you do an online degree?

Yes and no. I could do an online degree, but not for anything I’d be interested in going back to school for (at least nothing terribly useful). I’ve actually been surprised at some of the online offerings. There’s a decent state school near me, one I’ve considered going to if I could ever magically figure it out, but the online offerings are not great, mostly consisting of the typical degrees described as “useless” along with some seemingly made up programs. Another, at an even better school offers a variety of degrees, but most of them are BA’s described as being mostly for things like pre-law. Even the few interesting or useful degrees they offered online had a note indicating that it was probably better to complete a number of the courses in person.

Also I don’t see an online program providing me any of the things I want to get out of university. Sure I could use them to get “a degree”, but that’s not particularly what I’m interested in. Most online and non traditional programs seem to exist solely for economic mobility, I.e. someone in a dead end job wants to get some degree that might lead to some sort of career, and that’s not the position I find myself in right now.

I’ve been researching this for years, I actually hoped to be getting back to school this year, but after a layoff and a year of not being able to get high paid work, it’s just probably not going to happen. Tuition isn’t actually that bad in-state where I live now, but what is expensive is the cost of living, particularly when a bulk of full time work needs to be performed at the same time as classes run.

Prior to my current predicament, the plan was to do the first two years online through a community college, transfer to the school I was targeting through the state guarantee programs, and then hopefully have saved up enough money to weather the rest of an undergrad degree.

You maybe interested in OSSU: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

The knowledge is available sure, but I’m finding out more and more how meaningless it is. I could maybe learn most of what interests me even outside CS. The knowledge is there, but what I’m missing is the opportunities.

For example, I didn’t go to school, but many of my friends did. One good friend of mine from high school ended up getting a job in a really cool domain, not simple because he had the knowledge, but because he had the opportunities to work on those things in a setting with other people and connection to recruiting pipelines, etc. I could spend years studying the sort of thing he does on my own and never have a chance of really engaging with it or getting since to work in it. For another example, here’s another commenter on this thread giving an example of things you just can never get a chance do outside an academic setting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499943

Of course as I mentioned if I had gone to school at 17 or 18 I likely would have squandered all this trying to put in the minimum effort to get in and out asap.

My ideal goal isn’t to just snag some overpaid FAANG job. Though if that’s what will get me where I want than so be it.

Yeah idk what advice to give that you haven't heard. I don't know what you're aspiring to, but some dreams just remain that way. Sometimes it's best to accept that and focus on what you do have control over.

Do you enjoy what you do currently? Is it possible to grow that into a career that fulfills you?

Personally, I became much happier once I started looking outside my career for happiness. The best advice I got was use your job to earn money to pay for the things you love, as opposed to using your career as the sole means of fulfillment. Hopefully that helps

Who doesn't wish they could redo life with the benefit of perfect foresight/hindsight?

I went to UC Merced and had a great time in my computer science course. The professors were passionate about what they were teaching and honestly I became a much better engineer (not programmer) by learning the course material and applying those skills. I'm mainly a web dev now but courses like operating systems and computer architecture have concepts really can be abstracted to other systems if you know how it works fundamentally. I was a self taught programmer before I went to college; I think it was a bit humbling to be in that space as well with high flying theory in CS and was amazed how you could apply that to real life concepts.

That being said; if you're paying for school, make the most of it otherwise it's a waste, most engineering programs are pretty good and have at least some passionate professors behind them.

If you're paying to go to a fully equipped university, take all the laboratory based courses in natural sciences that you can. That can be by selecting an appropriate minor or by loading up on those courses as electives. (Assuming you aren't already majoring in the natural sciences.)

There is a wealth of material available online for self-study in many disciplines. But you aren't going to be able to download a mass spectrometer after you graduate, so take advantage of those well equipped labs while you can.

Unless you wanted to pursue a career related to the physical sciences, what is the benefit of taking labs? I ask this as someone that took a large number of physics and especially chemistry labs before ultimately switching to computer science. The labs to me were more about how to game the grading process than they were about actual learning. And certainly I wouldn’t say I took anything from those mentally that I didn’t get out of, say, theoretical organic chemistry synthesis problems.

College has significant pros and significant cons and their quality varies as hell.

People who try give advice that fits them all are almost always out of touch with reality.

Is going to good college and taking it seriously a good idea? Probably yea

Is going to shitty college and taking it seriously instead of just graduating and doing your own thing behind the scene a good idea?

Maybe not?

Because time spent on the college's stuff will probably be wasted meanwhile you could put more quality effort into other stuff, alone.

If you go to a "bad" college and don't take it seriously, then you are certainly wasting your money. There are surely other, far less expensive, ways to have a good social experience.

My advice would be go to college or don't, but don't do this in-between stuff where you're a dumb kid wasting a pile of money for no good reason.

>wasting your money.

Ehh, not every country in the world requires you to pay (except for the stuff like renting room).

I empathize with the idea that college feels like a waste of time. 18-22 is too early to be making major life decisions like what someone wants to do for the next 40 years of their life.

I wish the concept of apprenticeships would come back - a kid fresh out of high school can work adjacent to whatever career they're interested in for a few years. Then attend college from 21-25, then begin their full time career.

Looking back, I see that university gives a chance to direct your own study. It's there to develop your own approach to knowledge acquisition.

Of course, there's curriculum to chart the courses. Yet it's still up to you to explore the tangents, see the common sides, map your existing knowledge onto another domain.

I wish I could see more beyond course requirements and homeworks. It helps when professors could also draw such parallels, especially in applied sciences.

Totally agree - also beyond the coursework, explore other areas of interest and try to make friends who have diverse interests and backgrounds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com