Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
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stanford.edu
You don't become a shepherd by making yourself into a black sheep.
And there is nothing wrong with conforming.
There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life.
We all seem to want to be rare. But what does rare get you?
Solitude.
Maybe you truly want this? But think it through: are the grapes so sour? We are social animals.
I covet the courage to be and do whatever I wish to. I don't need to be scared to be seen along side others. This is a whim to will.
It is crazy to want to be more of an individual than others just for the sake of it, and it has nothing to do with living the way I just mentioned.
I can remark on this. (20+ years. Not by choice, entirely.)
Your point regarding conformity is valid given the qualification that for the overwhelming majority that is a perfectly reasonable choice. This holds true even for some remarkably exceptional people. As an example, Euler somehow managed to be Euler and a family man. And then you have individuals such as Beethoven who seemed destined for solitude even though he was not happy about it at all.
> rare
The long standing mantra of "to thine own self be true" holds. This is the golden compass. For some, being true one's self may require the path of solitude. For others, it may not.
The rare thing is to follow the sage advice.
"Wrong" is subjective, but a clear consequence of conformism (as I just described) that one might want to avoid. Is that it makes you more vulnerable to sacrificing your own interests for the interest of others. And more often than not, that means being vulnerable to scammers.
Now do it like everyone else, and make me a sandwich.
(Anecdotally, sometimes I have a feeling that lack of social interaction is an easy way to being if not a bit smarter, then at least more focused. However, some social interaction is still important, since 1) the lack of it isn't healthy, and 2) most of us in the end are working for the public anyway (sometimes without realizing it), so it's important to keep track that you work on the right things.)
I believe that a generation of extremely sophisticated, powerful, people who are eager to submit is a powerful and evil tool.
Fashionable status symbols are means by which one man dominates another. Many believe that a society of mutual respect will not seek tools of domination.
The issue with hierarchies is that they are historically weapons of oppression wielded against the marginal and unprivileged.
The issue with listening to what your friends think is cool is that your friends might be twats.
There really are problems with these behaviors, categorically. There really is a problem with submission, categorically. We are animals, we are spirits, we are not robots.
There's nothing wrong with robots. Be a robot if you want to. There are many people eager to use and reward you.
There are important contextual distinctions that need to be addressed here. There is nothing wrong? That's as foolish as saying conformity isn't wrong. Right or wrong, it's not about the morality of it. It's about the message you're sending about yourself and your abilities.
A sheep needs to be guided, everyday and everywhere. If you're the kind of person that needs to be shown what's cool/interesting/important/not important/funny/stupid then ultimately you have no leadership abilities and I would never hire you for anything useful. It not only speaks volumes about your leadership abilities, but also about your self-confidence. You don't value your own personal views enough to act on them. You don't look/act/create with the belief that YOU know what you're doing.
If, at the end of the day, you find you're not very useful as your own body, then conforming is ultimately the best thing to do. I personally feel that anyone that tries to stop conforming and just act and be according to their own personality 100% won't fail though. You'll find your niche, and you'll dominate it.
The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has calcified into "hoop" jumping.
The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.
In my experience, the person who feels no desire to conform whatsoever is an extreme aberration. Far more frequent are people that pretend to be such and actually simply flip the expected behaviour from a conformist norm and behave in a different way but still conforming to some social group.
Sure, they're individuals, just like the other members of their subculture / social clique, etc.
I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess under those conditions would be that most were.
But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1 asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less representative again.
(As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes what kind of people respond.)
It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?
That's one possible result. There are others.
Anyway, This essay is much the same that Allan Watts articulated in the 60s and I think he did it with much more panache and charm.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4
I find its best to laugh because it really has been a well executed practical joke.
Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.
To be fair economics has only been around for 300 or so years. We've had birth control in one form or another for thousands and we haven't even caught up with that yet.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...
Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in whatever sector of the economy.
People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to prove it.
Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena.
Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to think outside the box.
The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the people who blindly follow them.
There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default" thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has graduated from a top tier institution.
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Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.
Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-educated idiots.
Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out there.
What's wrong with vocational training? Maybe the issue is that the market is demanding vocational skills yet schools are trying to find, or trying to artificially create, a market for liberal-arts skills.
I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs, and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part time.
The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it. Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about.
People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.
It's also possible that Stanford might not be the best place for you if you are unable to get grants/scholarships, and it places too great of a financial burden. You can have a successful career with degrees from other universities as well.
If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major, I know that not only can they "complete a list of work", but that they're also probably smart. If I see a person who has straight As but majored in social sciences, I really can't conclude much about them.
Getting back to the point: if you really weren't that challenged by your coursework, why didn't you seek more challenging material? I find it hard to believe that everything you could ever study in college would be so easy for you, or anyone for that matter. It's just a shame b/c you say how college is mostly worthless because you weren't really challenged, but it sounds like you could've gotten more out if it if you studied something that pushed your boundaries more.
It astonishes me that you could come out with the attitude that everything is easy and college doesn't teach you anything useful.
Computer Science is not about learning to program C, or Java. If your college gave you that impression then it most certainly failed you.
Where did I say that?
When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".
...
I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.
What about graph theory? Complexity theory? Machine learning algorithms? Cache-aware and cache-oblivious algorithms? Randomized algorithms? Numerical computing? Cryptography? Scientific computing (fitting data, doing simulated experiments)?
I certainly learned some of these topics in undergrad CS, although only at a basic level considering each domain is quite deep.
I think there is a lot of wisdom in these lines above. A degree (any degree) communicates some bare minimum qualification, rather than high standards of ability or talent.
A comment by a Phd. friend comes to mind: "A Phd. proves that a person can grind at one seemingly endless problem for years upon years, unperturbed by the countless setbacks and seeming lack of progress along the way to (hopefully) a breakthrough. Nothing more, nothing less."
Let's suppose that a Phd. really only proves this one trait about someone. Is this "signal" worthless?
I personally don't think so. I for one am a person who definitely cannot stick to one particular problem for years upon years. I'm not suitable for a position in, say, IBM Labs [1]. For a Hiring Manager in such a place, screening for a Phd. does in fact make sense.
[1] Thankfully, the world has options for invalids like myself.
Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.
I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.
How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this? When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".
You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it. This is a real problem with computer science degrees. I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.
How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this?
I agree with you here -- they suck and shouldn't exist. I had the luxury of attending a school that (with the strange exception of the Econ department) didn't allow mandatory pre-reqs as a matter of policy.
You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it.
Sure. But that doesn't mean that the opportunities for hard things aren't there, just that you weren't motivated (and perhaps rightly so) to pursue them. Also, these things are only tedious because you already know them. It sounds like you went back to college because you saw an economic advantage in doing so and are upset because it wasn't also intellectually advantageous. In other words, you were optimizing for economics and not knowledge. If you were instead optimizing for knowledge, then it sounds like going back to college would not have been the best choice for you, although I still stand by the claim that it's impossible to go through college without being presented with an opportunity to learn something of deep and meaningful value.
Anyway, I think the problem is not so much that college is generally useless, but rather that there is an economic benefit for seemingly smart, self-educated people like yourself to go back to college even though the experience is perhaps not that useful for you otherwise.
EDIT:
My point is this: Just because you can pass classes you already know everything about with an easy A in college doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to learn more advanced things via the faculty and resources provided to you and it's partially on you to take advantage of those opportunities. Moreover, I think it's impossible to go through college and have none of those opportunities open to you.
With that being said, college isn't necessarily the best way to learn things, and whether or not it is is completely dependent on who you are. In your case, college was probably economically advantageous in the long run, but sounds like it wasn't the best way to learn novel skills. This doesn't mean college isn't a valid way for people to educate themselves generally, as not everyone comes to college able to place out of everything.
Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that time in a lab with a professor, or in the library, or any number of countless opportunities to explore. For example, I still wish I had made the time to learn a little about quantum physics and general relativity (both out of the scope of my studies). I can still learn about those things now, but at a university you have classes, professors and students all at your disposal.
You might think that sounds senseless now, but you already know what interests you, and have probably already explored other territory.
Protip: you can take "freshman physics/chemistry" as a senior if it's not a pre-req for anything else you need. And by then, you'll have learned to study more effectively than when you were a freshman and it'll be ~2 hours a week of work.
That said, at my university your major only takes up 1/3rd of your overall credit hours so I had tons of time for electives and courses far outside CS.
The grading function you are paying for is important. Otherwise you could just take a syllabus, go off and complete the work on your own and be done.
You need to pay someone to assess the work.
Whether the amount you pay for this "service" is proportional to the benefit you get from it is for you to decide.
But you need to have those "assessments" done.
Admission to a top tier institution functions as an early assessment. You gain credentials just by being admitted, assuming you manage to graduate. This is interesting since the assessment is only based on a brief period of observation, e.g. the person's achievements up to the end of high school.
A criticism that has sometimes been levelled at Stanford is that once you are admitted you can coast your way to graduation.
Obviously that is certainly not true at lower tier universities. Faculty will fail students and those institutions will not hesitate to send them packing. There is always another student to fill the empty seat.
This is an odd criticism. While I was at Stanford, the school administrators were extremely concerned with a ubiquitous problem on campus called "Stanford Duck Syndrome": looking serene and peaceful above the surface, but underneath the water, paddling as hard as possible to keep from sinking.
You could say I was an academically-inclined kid. I started high school a year early. And during that year, I passed AP Calculus with the maximum score of 5. I studied for the SAT for a week, took it only once, and if I recall correctly scored in the 98th percentile. And finally, I matriculated at Stanford at age 16.
But still, Stanford was by a large margin the most difficult thing I'd ever done up to that point. And it would not be a huge stretch to include everything I've done ever since.
I've come to understand since graduating that, for many other institutions, the professor applies a curve to an exam in response to the overall performance of the class being poor. At Stanford, it is expressed at the start that the exam will be curved -- because the professors intend to make it so difficult that they are confident that, in their classroom of highly motivated, intelligent students, only a small handful will be able to get As; it is intended to be a way to differentiate the very top students.
Let me give you a sense of what this feels like. I was taking the freshman physics series with the world champion in physics. Blake Ross, one of the guys behind Firefox, was attending while I was there. Even while I was learning how to swim at Avery Aquatic Center, I saw Don Knuth finishing up lap swimming....
I am not saying that this term or even this phenomenon is strictly unique to Stanford, but I simply have never observed "duck syndrome" used in this sense in any other context. This includes the Internet, personal conversations, and so on. And now, it includes this Hacker News thread, because aside from Drbble's vaguely plausible remark no one has yet come forth that their institution employed this term as well.
My take on it is that, just as everyone has their own mascot, everyone has their own vocabulary, which probably includes their own coinage for this experience if they indeed have this experience to describe.
As I've said many times, a degree is just your ticket to being some else's bitch.
A person may decide that it's not worth investing 4 years and lots of money for the sake of a degree, but a degree has advantages that should not be ignored.
That aside, you can learn anything you want outside of college, for free. Information is free, thanks to the internet.
I'm mostly speaking from personal (and vicarious) experience - when I graduated from college, I put out around 100 job applications -- no response. Then I released my first project, and had employers coming to me (Electronic Arts and Pixar, to name two). Make your own destiny -- all a degree gives you is an unwarranted sense of entitlement.
It's also worth bearing in mind that spending 3-4 years focused on learning stuff like math,econ and CS rigorously can help your abilities to build a business later.
You might be able to setup your web dev shop at 18 and make a nice living for a few years making CRUD apps or whatever but once the market starts to demand something else then you are likely to get stuck if you haven't put some study into higher level principles.
Besides there is nothing stopping you from running a simple business at the same time as going to college. Myself and a few others on my CS course used to build websites and fix PCs during the holidays and made more money for about half the hours as the people working at the supermarkets and pubs.
A common mistake people make is that any given subject (math, econ, etc) is limited to your studies in college. I have studied biology, architecture, the classics, geology, meteorology, botany, and much more outside of college.
It does depend whether or not you are a self learner, but is paying 120k+ really worth it to have someone twist your arm? Everything you can learn in college, you can learn outside, for free -- the interent has democratized information.
You don't have a representative experience. Try going to a top 5 school in science/ engineering/ math.
Maybe his experience is the representative of most colleges and yours from a "top 5 school" the exception.
Well, duh.
Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.
So, I guess they "win" that argument. But, it's an expensive argument to win; and it's kind of a shame, really.
As an aside, I also wanted to respond to this line:
> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything
Yes and no. In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A. It sounds like your background meant that you'd already learned a lot of the material independently, so your situation is different, but I think comments like the above are rather misleading for the bulk of students, who are learning this material on their first time around.
More likely, the purpose of a university education is to learn.
And that does not necessarily require the professor to happen.
There should never be anything wrong with doing work outside of class, or any implication that doing the work is "not enough". Often learning happens in that time outside of class spent "just doing the work", not "in class" where a professor is struggling to "have fun".
You're also right that learning doesn't necessarily require a professor. But, if you're the sort of student that could learn something without the prof, and yet you have the prof right there, I bet that if you thought about it you could think of some relevant questions to ask that would let you learn more (or faster); and I can almost guarantee that if you're that kind of student the prof would be more than delighted to answer.
As I noted above, the problem is not that doing the work isn't enough; it's that if you go in thinking, hey, I just gotta check every box and I'll get an A, you're a lot less likely to actually succeed in getting the boxes checked in the first place.
Asking questions is crucial. If you cannot formulate the right questions, you cannot progress in learning.
This student sounds like a self-starter. I just think it's uncalled for to question what he did. Even if he thinks of it as "just checking boxes". He might not think of it that way in years to come.
He did the work. He kept his GPA up.
Hopefully he was intellectually curious and he formulated questions (even if he never got the chance to ask them). If he has aspirations for grad school, "it's not over yet".
There's still plenty of time to reconsider viewing his education as "checking off boxes" and to become more curious.
Meanwhile he did the work. And that's more than many students do.
No, I went to college determined to learn a lot, spent about 2 years on pre-reqs, then dropped out because I wasn't really learning anything. Starting a company was far more interesting than going to school at the time, and still is. When I went back, I decided to go as fast as I could, because I wanted to get it over with, fully aware that there wasn't much to learn from earlier experience.
There were some instructive classes. I had a professor that was passionate about assembly, and another that I had for several classes, that gave me an FPGA board and told me I could build whatever I wanted, and he would grade me on that, since the coursework would be very easy for me. I built a basic processor, with an assembly language I devised, which was more instructive than anything I ever actually did in a class. The vast majority, however, were not worth much.
What's interesting is that I was interested enough in the subject to learn tons about it on my own over the course of more than a decade. A couple years of institutional bullshit was enough to change that. Today, I'd much prefer to do Udacity or Coursera courses than go to an actual school. At least I can study exactly what I want, and the assignments are well thought out.
Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.
Doesn't that really depend on the material. I flipped through some of the assignments you have on your website, and while you do have some interesting assignments, you also have stuff like Homework 5 in your sys admin class, where the student has to use traceroute to learn about the topology of the school's network. I am certain I could have done that assignment in 6th or 7th grade without difficulty. If I had to do it now, I would absolutely hate it. It is a fine assignment for students that have never troubleshot a networking issue, but if you have any experience whatsoever, its simply tedious and not particularly instructive. Nobody is going to be motivated by tedious easy assignments.
In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A.
I believe that you sincerely believe this. I sincerely believe it is not true. Checking boxes is indistinguishable from outstanding work, by your metrics. Somebody that is checking a checkbox by definition won't miss anything, the truly interested student is more likely to deeply explore one area and go lightly on another, becoming the A- or B+ student. If you have knowledge going in, the easiest thing to do is juke the stats and grind out as fast as possible.
I think I agree completely with this last sentence:
> If you have knowledge going in, the easiest thing to do is juke the stats and grind out as fast as possible.
I guess my larger point is that a lot of your argument hinges on that first clause---"if you have knowledge going in"---which is not true of the typical student; and that even when you do have the knowledge going in, the "easiest" way is not the most productive, not the most effective use of your tuition money, and not, in general, the best.
That's the problem in a nutshell. If you choose a major where you already know 50%+ of the material, you won't get much out of it. I take it you took computer engineering (based on the FPGA class), but what if you had gone back to school and learned biophysics? You probably would have gotten more out of it.
I have lived this. I taught myself to programm in 5th or 6th grade. By 8th grade I was whipping up 3D games using OpenGL and what not. When I was picking majors and I absolutely did not want to go into computer science. I knew it was going to be a waste of my time.
My main 3 options were mechanical engineering, economics, and history. I based this solely on other areas I was interested in. I chose mechanical engineering and ended up taking about a dozen computer science courses for my major after testing out of the lower level classes. I learned a lot about AI, computer graphics, computer vision, and the like but skipped the BS 'learning how to programm' classes that would have been a waste. It worked out well. My mechanical engineering classes were all completely new material for me and I got a lot more out of it than if I had just taken CS.
To anyone who is a self taught programmer, I would suggest getting a minor in CS or double majoring. Simply getting a CS degree isn't enough new material to make it worthwhile. Math, physics, bio, chem, and economics all compliment a CS background very well. Obviously mechanical, chemical, computer, or electrical engineering match up very well with CS (but a double engineering major is TOUGH).
I know people who got high grades (in CS) at college who couldn't write a practical program to save their lives and are now working in some business role. I also know people with mediocre grades who are busy doing interesting stuff with machine learning and cloud computing.
The problem is, there are a lot of students that can grind a checklist that are worthless.
One of my professors (Dr. Mazumdar, NMT) had a saying about complexity theory: "A computer science degree will never get you a job, but it may keep you from getting fired."
Cheating at solitaire? Of course you can go through the motions, but for the money (even public) education costs, that seems like quite a waste of opportunity.
Memorization will do a lot for you. First of all it will get the building blocks for all that "thought and understanding" into your head. Just like lego: you may arrange bricks in very creative and novel ways, but bricks must be there to begin with.
I have a question about this observation. How is this different from someone with years of work experience, who demonstrated in practice that he or she was able to finish large software projects on time, on specification and on budget as a lead developer?
I'm asking this because I dropped out of college because of money constraints. I had a three hour commute each day, had a job next to my studies, and slowly but surely piled up debt in order to cover my basic expenses (food, rent, insurance, books). I had zero support from my family or the government.
I make the same observations as you, it seems to me that many doors will remain closed to me. Not all, mind you, over time you get to know people and build a network of sorts.
First is that except for college, you have almost nothing in common with HR people that are filtering the CV, so they may undervaluate your experience.
Then there is the generation gap with the middle managers that have risen to their position before the big waves of outsourcing by following the now mythical career path. They will overvalue college degrees vs experience.
Then there is the prestige of the company: lot of companies only hires people with college degree as a policy, period. Other companies have implicit policy: nobody has ever been fired to hire a Stanford graduate.
Finally there is bias - if you paid a lot for your education, or are paying a lot for your kid education - you will have a positive bias toward people with education (and sometimes, negative bias against people that dropped out)
The sad conclusion is - having a degree is never perceived as something negative, at worst, it is ignored. Not having a degree is never a positive thing, at best it is ignored.
My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates.
Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came from working at a Government Military organization called as GTRE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...). I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my semester holidays.
Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic.
Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done.
Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over again for me.
I do think reading and technology are not important in education. We people retain information far better through audio vs reading. See research from University of Regensburg http://www.linguatec.de/products/tts/references/uni_regensbu...
"The best results were achieved by experimentees who read and listened to a text simultaneously."
Also, that page doesn't cite the research its claims rely on.
How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects? Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS.
The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc. probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.
They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time.
I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince myself that the faculty is doing so.
The most interesting people I think are those who excel at that game because they realize that it's just the way society functions, but on a side maintain a soul-- interesting extracurricular interests, projects, etc. They use their knowledge not only to pass tests, but attempt to expand on it and apply it in their own creative ways.
That's why I think the article's title is not very appropriate. I'd call it "Is Stanford training just (really excellent) sheep?". There are some good arguments to be made for an affirmative answer, and yet that's not who I see when I look around me.
Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."
But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.
The sort of folk who are going to just jump through the academic hoops and nothing else are exactly the same sort of people who jump through similar industry hoops. They do what they're supposed to do and not a lot else.
The people who see the degree certificate as the goal are the same sort of folk who see the promotion or the parking space or the corner office as the goal. They see the what, but not the why.
People seem bent towards that particular approach to life long before they get to work or university.
It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.
It's abuse in a bottle, wolves realize this and profit off the sheep.
Here the weekend means nothing. People work 6-7 days per week, and are always on. They lose the rhythm. Religion fills the void a bit with friday prayers an excuse to work less, but really.
You should be more grateful for what you've got... you benefit from a society that doesn't expect you to be on 7 days per week.
Arseholes aren't particularly rare.
What is rare is the person who does exactly what they want without ruining life for everyone around them while actually improving the world in some way.
* the church callout is unnecessary, it can be a type of self-analysis
* Alcohol is not toxic and in reasonable quantities does not have a purely deleterious effect.
* When needing to make personal connections (which one always will since you learn a lot from others, not to mention the benefits of having connections and even just social interactions) it is good to look like you fit in, so others do not become defensive.
* there's a limited amount of time and energy available for coming up with your own things. If somebody gives me clothes that are comfortable and look good, I won't spend time thinking of what clothes would "really be me as an individual". On my last personal project I had my own design, but we ended up looking through a Web Design idea book, made something that looked rather standard, and ended up with a better reaction, as it's what was expected and hence more usable. In other words, pick your battles, save up for the big innovations, recognize the value of others, and stand on their shoulders, even if you have to conform a bit to do so
Everyone is unique if you only count the things that make them different, and people are pretty similar if you look for things that make them alike.
Even if you are making the opposite choice, if your every decision is predicated on the trends, I'd still call you a slave to them.
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/610/ (Also a great statement on solipsism.)
Actively defying the norm for its own sake is counterproductive. If your choices are based directly on trends by actively pushing against every one of them you notice your still a slave to them.
I do what I want to do because I want to do it. Sometimes that means doing things that gasp other people also enjoy doing. Are we all sheep then? I get the Fight Club anti-consumerism mentality, but taking it just as far in the other direction isn't any better. Trading one sheeps skin for another means you're still a sheep.
BTW, wines and beers have been produced for almost as long as humanity has been around. If everyone who enjoys a drink once in awhile is only doing it because it's cool, then alcohol is longest lasting fad known. :)
It would really take a special kind of defiance to say "no thank you" to what the non-conformists clique expects their own to be.
Most animals are driven by a desire to eat, sleep and reproduce including humans. There are exceptions like worker bees and ants that can't reproduce, there is no analog in humans.
But seriously, if you keep going down this line of thought you will soon end up a lunatic staggering through a hall of mirrors. Just give up and be yourself, whatever that seems to be at any given moment.