Hacker News Reader

Comment by navait | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs.

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.

View on HN

I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late.

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 am a fresh graduate, and I came into university with the same attitude as him, in a scholarship program full of people with my attitude. Fortunately, the dean talked to my freshman class during orientation. He said: "Yes, you're smart. But you'll find here, everyone else is also smart. You'll find that you have to distinguish yourself through the work you do.". Admittedly, my ego was too big at the time to really take the thought seriously, but after meeting so many wonderful people at the university, and many people who were so ridiculously smarter than I was I realized how special I wasn't. For the most part, I found people who kept my attitude didn't fare as well as the students who did change.

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.

They are situational tools. They are not the catch all sink of learning, in the same way public instructor driven 30 students 40 - 60 minute blocks x8 chalkboard and tests isn't the catch all way to teach the masses in general for 12 years. The problem is everyone wants a one size fits all answer that takes in toddlers and spits out hyper-successful professionals in the most prosperous industries and human beings aren't best placed on conveyor belts in a factory.

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.

Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's a disaster to everyone, not just me.

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.

Realize, please, that many as passionate as you, and with many of the same opinions, have gone into education to try to improve it. Not just now, but for decades.

That is exactly the point that I raised in the essay. Education is a really hard problem. I don't claim I know how to fix it, but while everyone seems to agree that everything is broken, we are heading in the wrong direction.

I wouldn't say education is that hard on any fundamental level. It is, however, quite heavily constrained by factors that have nothing to do with actual education.

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.

You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit out the marrow.

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.

What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and raytracing graphical techniques.

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.

Camp in 3rd floor Padelford Library.

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.

To be fair, there was only one paragraph lamenting that the system didn't bend to his needs. If you think that was the theme of this essay, then I suggest you reread it.

For values of one where one equals three intro paragraphs and subsequently sprinkled through the essay, finishing up with a conclusion paragraph that is entirely unsurprising ('kids these days aren't getting the right skills')

It's signed off with one of the more banal slogans you could hope to encounter (the bit in bold).

We're in agreement for once, vacri. It started off strong and then veered off into embarrassing hyperbole. The part where he has a solution to the ills of the world but the margin is too small to contain it was my particular favourite.

> Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs.

s/system/blogger/ and pot meets kettle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com