What I Learned In College
blackhole12.blogspot.com
blackhole12.blogspot.com
I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.)
I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper.
I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.)
I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's outcomes.
I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it.
(I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)
I've had the same experience. And I hate how colleges seem not to recognize that.
I imagine that those are going to become increasingly popular. If you abstract it out, its basically a credential system for productive independent thought, which is sort of the whole point.
However, as someone who supervises independent studies regularly, I can also say: independent studies are by far the classes most likely to result in the student just not doing anything at all, which to some extent shows why autodidacticism is not universal yet. In a traditional semester-long class with two-times-a-week meetings, it's very rare for a student to literally do nothing. Most will show up at least some of the time, and do at least some of the work. But it's easy to put off an independent study, because you have complete flexibility, and don't have to do anything this week if other things are more pressing. Then you end up 90% of the way through the semester realizing you haven't done anything.
Some very good stuff comes out of independent-study projects, but the variance is large, and it doesn't work for everyone. As a supervisor, they take a disproportionate amount of management effort, just trying to track students down and prod them into non-procrastination.
I skipped an entire years worth of useless general ed courses to get my "requirements" to graduate out of the way at my college on 6 CLEP tests. I think the notes I took for those tests reading the wikibooks and wikipedia articles on the various topics on those tests were some of the best domain information notes I've taken. I also wrote them online, so pretty much all my K-12 notes are useless, but I gave my CLEP notes to my extended family with notes they need to read the material themselves but I did a bunch of work already.
I skipped out on 26 credit hours of 140ish for the degree. It basically allowed me to change my major a year in without impacting my graduation date.
When you say "you're more or less paying for the piece of paper" you're taking it for granted (unless you went to a shitty school). As an Autodidact in Mathematics, programming, compsci, and psychology with nothing but a GED; you underestimate the value of rigorous environments.
Learning fast is also not the point. Learning thoroughly is the point. Thorough and rigorous learning is really fucking hard when an Autodidact. University is an environment that allusively inspires rigor. You're surrounded by peers doing the same thing you are; you have access to instructors that are (sometimes) the best in their field; and you have access to facilities (even as an alum!) that are prohibitively expensive for non-matriculating learners.
Autodidacism is hard because you have to hold yourself to extremely high standards, you have to play with your own psychology to control inspiration and perseverance (you aren't accountable to anyone!!). So even if you learn on your own now after college you still will have a number tools at your disposal that you would've had to develop on your own without college.
Yes, I learn far better on my own too, but do not discount the enormous opportunity you had by going through college.
I'd love to hear more about your autodidacism. Do you mind explaining your learning process a bit more?
Anyway, he gets up at 6AM every day and runs through a spaced repetition routine. He's written about his process here: http://ixmat.us/articles/2012-12-01_usable-org-drill.html
Send me a message at my email in my profile!
Managing your own time and learning curve is really hard. As an autodidact, I can just not do it because I am tired, busy, not in the mood, or whatever.
The second thing that college grads don't get the value of is that they are able to learn by some proven path. This path is not etched out so well and requires considerable research, self-assessment, and decisions that aren't comfortable at all times. You could spend weeks a) researching what is next and b) attempting things you aren't ready for and blowing off a few weeks on something you gained nothing from because that knowledge base just wasn't there.
There are many other little things you learn in college that are at times quite difficult to learn about on your own. Despite the apparent "free" education, nothing is free and there are things that you simply cannot learn or discover on your own. Guidance, whether from an instructor or a mentor, is very important when you are learning. Trust me, I'd gladly shovel out money for good guidance.
You also live a lonely life and there is no one you can call up who is also struggling or trade information with.
There is no way to really test yourself so you know you are correct and where you went wrong. Self-testing is either very hard or impossible in many instances, and that little epiphany you get from a red circle isn't available for you. It takes a certain amount of brutal honesty to get it right, and then you still don't always know. This is frustrating for me.
The final piece is the double-edged sword of readiness. As a grad, you have proved to someone or some institution that you have mastered the material and are ready to work, whereas when you are an autodidact, you simply won't have the confidence to face an interviewer unless you are something like 10x better than any bachelor-holder, and sometimes masters-holder, that walks through the door. The time you lose on getting better and better -- plus the massive confidence boost -- is offset in spades by a decent education.
Is there some sort of network for people on the outside of the university system? A mailing list or something?
With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is live video (ala Skype) plus a whiteboard - the main surface of the iPad.
The problem in learning isn’t information access: it’s determination. It’s dead easy to put down a book or stop watching a lecture. If you’re talking to someone, you cannot just stop, and when a human asks "what have you done since last time?" you don’t want to have to say "nothing". Think of single founder vs two founder startups - someone else who cares is huge.
On the mentoring side, explaining a concept to someone else is a forcing function for getting things clear and organized for yourself. Also, it's fun to talk about stuff you chose to spend time working on and understanding, and it's fun to help someone else follow in your footsteps.
Given that, why would someone want to spend three week's salary just to download your app?
I also disagree that determination is the the problem for many autodidacts. Many of us really do enjoy the experience of learning and there is a mile of difference between slacking off and quitting. Personally, I would never pressure someone into learning that isn't into it. The Autodidact brain is not built like this.
With the iPad requirement (too poor for that + refusal to buy Apple anything and no I won't change my mind when I have enough money) and an apparent misunderstanding of who I am, I'm probably not in your target audience.
This really should be a web-based business. What is the obsession with making everything apps these days?
I was asking for someone to talk to, not a stick.
With that in mind, if you would like to talk to me my email is included in the public key on my profile. (You don't have to use the key if you don't want to. You can just import it and read the email address. I do that to stop spammers from finding it.)
You must realize, for a very human experience (learning and social/peer bonding around the topics) - technology is only an enabler and not whole pony show.
What's lacking is a platform for genuine collaboration and discussion on the topic of learning qua learning for people that are creating their own formal process of learning.
I have a feeling that this will manifest as a conference or weeklong retreat - rather than an app or discussion forums.
I've seen courses where we're taught next to nothing in terms of thoroughness and also courses that stick us neck deep in the subject, literally going from axioms to a complete, standard mathematical framework.
This. I was watching John Adams and he made an excellent quote when speaking to his son, "A scholar is made alone and sober." It's going to be my mantra for my senior year at college.
Then if either party have questions about the material, they have a fantastic outlet to ask them to. Then acing a class is really manageable.
That'll work fine until the things you want to learn are not written down anywhere. Most traumatic moment of grad school: Google thesis topic and realize that no one, no where knows anything about this (*&.
Then it gets fun :) Talking with other knowledgeable people will dramatically accelerate the self-teaching process then.
Most people will never do this, though.
It's wonderful! I'm the only one who's fucking touched this stuff!
What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!"
Get it out of your head that being smart entitles you to anything or makes you special. You'll find your classmates aren't robots, and are just as smart as you, and have a lot to offer.
That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.
I also think posts like this ignore all the students who navigate the system successfully. It makes our universities seem as failures, when they provide so much value and sucesses.
Some people benefit. Some people suffer. Some are indifferent and get bored. The bigger problem is figuring out there are many ways to learn beyond a book and a grade, and that we need to figure out how each individual learns best.
It's signed off with one of the more banal slogans you could hope to encounter (the bit in bold).
To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special online high school and get tutoring help just to graduate. He is very bright, but the system just crushes him because he can't operate within it very well and the system doesn't care.
I did once try to get into research. Academic research has a whole boatload of its own problems, including the professor/graduate student ponzi scheme and the overemphasis on getting published. I decided doing research on my own would be much more fruitful.
My classmates were usually quite smart. They were also usually just as frustrated with the system as I was.
Imagine someone told you to build a robot out of wood and brass and whatever you could dig out of the ground, as a one-man effort, in a workshop. You might come up with steampunk and completely impress "someone", but more likely you'd just fail utterly because "someone" has given you loads and loads of extraneous constraints that have nothing to do with "build a robot" and everything to do with "I've dropped you into the late 19th century".
That is how education gets constrained.
Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the PhD system. However, meaningful research will require interaction with interested colleagues to increase the chance of useful work being done. This can take place independent of the so called Ponzi scheme. While there is some truth to that description, it has no bearing on your refusal to engage with research as an undergrad and is totally dilatory. If you hold yourself to such high standards you should be ashamed to use that as an excuse.
Grad school probably would have run me into the ground. It would have done so for all the wrong reasons. Again, I'm not interested in a hyper-competitive environment where I am judged on all the wrong things. I'd rather do my own research, and have actually made progress along several avenues I'm quite proud of, but currently haven't crystallized into something I can write a paper about (also due to time constraints).
Stop glorifying long work hours. They aren't productive.
If your code compiles, it's proved.
Oreilly titles, Stack Overflow, net et al >> `non-coder friends, chuckles, and puppies'.
Play computer chess against `chess', not human limbic systems.
Original discovery is greater than a paycheck.
Have fun.
s/system/blogger/ and pot meets kettle.
The first way is easier, but leaves you with little residual knowledge, and you don't even know how to apply that knowledge. The second way is much harder, and it requires work on your part. However, it pays off. Not only you get to pass the test, you're also now armed with useful knowledge.
At my time in university, I've taken both approaches towards various subjects. For the algorithms class, I made a lot of effort to study and understand the subject. Today, I still have it in my head, and can apply it when needed. For differential equations, I just studied for the test. I don't remember anything now, and it's my fault for being lazy. I got an "A" in both subjects, by the way.
What I'm trying to say is, the system is just fine as long as qualified professors are teaching. The problem is lazy students.
Agreed. Along similar lines:
Any problem that can be solved with clearly-defined steps can be programmed so that a computer can solve it. Many areas of education, especially math-related ones, involve students learning to mechanically implement set procedures and formulas to solve problems. These mechanical processes can all by definition be solved by a computer, so why pretend that these technologies do not exist? Human computers were once necessary, but they have since been supplanted.
I'm sure we've all had a-ha! moments of the form "it's just like Professor Whatsisname / Coach Thingo / Mrs So-and-so said, I just didn't get it".
Much scarier than the idea that the education system is failing, is the idea that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the increasingly meager role that our society assigns it. As OP points out, there isn't a textbook with the answers for meaningful real-world problems--but there is one that tells you precisely how many pumps of chocolate syrup go in a grande mocha.
HN readers may be a priori more prepared to accept the watered-down version of this idea. "Of course the system needs creative problem solving, that's the most important part of my job!" If this describes you, congratulations, you are one of the priviliged few who has what the economist David Autor calls an "analytic" job. In fact, it's increasingly likely that the very purpose of your job is to ensure that there's no middle ground between you and those textbook-following Starbucks workers[1].
1: http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-jo...
I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring and vindicating when I found it.
About halfway through their first cryptic gcc error message, these students discover that their burning passion is really for Arts or Business or whathaveyou.
Programming is way harder to learn than any of us can remember.
You're right, there is a large pool of undergrads who want to teach, and the department takes full advantage of that. Unlike every other department at UW (that I know of), CSE pays undergrads to teach section (20 student classes that supplement the main lectures). Around 50 to 80 undergrads teach every quarter.
Furthermore, the instructors are insanely dedicated to diversity of minds. They constantly try to incorporate different ways of thinking into their courses to encourage students who might not be the math-y or computer-y types to understand their own potential. As evidence of this: the principal lecturer of the intro classes, Stuart Reges, gives keynote speeches at educational conferences on the success of the UW CSE program in attracting and retaining women in CSE. There is a huge amount of diversity among CSE majors -- double majors in art, business, math, linguistics, etc.
The problem is funding. Even though there is a huge demand for CSE degrees, the department doesn't have enough money to provide them. There's talk now of implementing differential tuition at UW, meaning that majoring in a high-demand field will cost you more than majoring in a low-demand one. This might allow the CSE department to fulfill the demand, but who knows if it's really a good idea.
Sorry for the long winded reply! Didn't mean for this to stretch out. I guess I took your comment a little too personally. :)
(even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.)
I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots.
Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.
Almost. John Steinbeck said it best, IMO, "We now face the danger which has been the most destructive to the humans. Success, comfort, and ever increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."
We all wish that CSE was an open major at UW. But you're ignoring a huge amount of complex practical issues when you blame bureaucracy. You offer simplistic criticism but no solutions.
In response here are a few things I think people should consider:
It seems to me that the GPA requirements for computer science are being made pretty strict in response to trying to get the students to take other paths because some colleges don't want to have so many computer science major students. This seems like a problem because these colleges are not really adapting to the situation and are instead just trying to push students to other curriculum by making the grade requirements much stricter for certain majors.
I think math in college is probably much better than it was in middleschool as well. I definitely agree I hated repeating multiplication tables and all that. It just was not fun. And it did not even feel like learning. I think there are many people who are interested in math and will not really know it till they read more about the different subjects that are in it.
Theres no easy answers in education like there is no easy answers in government policy. It's just too much generalization that cannot be quantified. The abstraction in some college classes has gotten me a bit annoyed since the teachers almost do not consider the other students.
One case is where I had a teacher who on the last day of class changed the main assignment of the whole class to be more clearly worded in a really bad way. He failed to provide adequate time for students mainly.
On the last day of class he decided that students writing a group assignment should only hand in 1 group assignment (with no instruction about how one person can remove a copy of the assignment turned in through blackboard). When a group of 4 people has to coordinate anything in less than a single day it's an idiots game.
My main compliant- This could have been much easier if he just graded the latest turned in papers. Or he graded the earliest ones. It wouldn't have mattered that much to some, but he really threw a bunch of his students under the bus for a grading policy that was rather unreasonable. Instead he decided to deduct 10% off that grade because of some rule he made up in the last day of a 6 week class that was unfair because he did not provide adequate instruction.
Simple Game Theory will tell you something will go wrong in such a small time frame with no information. Unfortunately, my college was silly enough to not want to fix this huge blunder an professor made. In my honest opinion even the basics of game theory should be taught to teachers and people looking to go into politics. People need to understand there is a reasoning policy behind different actions. Even if it's a non-mathematical introduction to game-theory for the most part. People need to realize there are smarter ways of getting people motivated to do things which may be better than what they are thinking.
~credibility is for curmudgeons.