Please Excuse my Grammar

An Objectivist complaining about fairness. That's rich.

"I hold to several key ideals, I hold that I am a man. I believe that there is nothing higher than myself, no god, I am a god, I can make the world into what I wish. I hold that I have no right to impede another human being and no one has a right to impede me. I aspire to be the best I can be and attempt to only deal with others who believe as I do. I work hard for everything I own and I intend to keep all I can. I am against taxes, I am against a welfare state, I am against anything which forces me to help others that I do not wish to help. What I am is an Objectivist of sorts. I never wish my freedom to be taken from me and will always be willing to fight for it if there is a battle I can win. I believe in reason, logic, and that greed is good." [1]

[1] http://austingwalters.com/about/

The problem here is simple: working hard isn't enough. If you can't pull all A's, get good test scores, and great recommendations, then you can't have graduate school. Obviously it's unfair, in large part because someone wealthier won't have to work to survive and can concentrate on his or her studies. The converse of that, though, is when things get hard and the rubber hits the road the student will have some margin of error. The author of this piece has none, as he admits. That makes him a liability to an academic system that requires professors to make many of their graduate students slave labor hours so that they can publish at an appropriate level.

I've been to the highest levels of grad school and had to leave because of personal problems. There's nothing quite so painful as being told that your spouse's terminal illness has little to no bearing on your examining committee's opinion of you. (n.b., I was in a European school, so I couldn't take more than a three year leave of absence before presenting and defending my thesis. My examiners could have given me another year, but they refused, saying that my spouse wasn't exactly going to get better during that span)

This is all utterly unfair, but the sad fact of the matter is that graduate school isn't for the author. I don't mean that it's an unrealistic dream, I mean that it's not going to give a rat's ass about the author's life situation and grad school will treat him like shit when he has to take time to deal with very real life problems that academics tend to gloss over. The author would be better served by avoiding grad school for now and establishing himself financially. Good professional experience will counteract many of his GPA shortcomings (and most schools will ignore those if he has professional experience). When he's in a position to get a fully-funded position in grad school, only then should he go, because only then will he be able to commit himself 100% to his studies.

The author argues that he is "smart" due to his performance on standardized tests ("I feel smart, my tests showed I’m smart"), but then turns around and argues that a standardized measurement of performance (the GPA) does not measure "smart" ("does a 3.5+ GPA really mean that? To me it seems more like they played it safe, they didn’t push themselves hard enough").

His takeaway is that the tests are right (because he feels they are right) and that the system and the GPA have failed him.

My takeaway is that there really isn't a good metric for measuring "smart" or whether someone really groks the material offered in class... and that the education system really needs to have more of an emphasis flexibility and really grooming teachers to look at students' abilities and performances holistically.

I want to say that a "good" counselor would have looked at the author and said "Ok -- you've done well on your tests and I understand that the environment is disruptive for you. Why don't we set up a meeting with an AP teacher and let them gauge you?"

Relying on "good" teachers and "good" counselors is scary, though. It means you have to trust human beings and not objective metrics where you can say "this is a pass" or "this is a fail."

I empathize with you! I enrolled in community college after leaving school in 1st grade (yes, first grade. I was six). No high school diploma, no GED. After 2 years I transferred to a top 50 university, and it's a miserable system. I'm taking grad classes at the same time as undergrad to try to spice up what I'm learning, but the complete lack of interest-driven education is absolutely despicable. I would drop out and work as a freelance coder full time (it's crazy how much that pays), but I only have a year left, supposedly. My grades are only good in the classes I've enjoyed and have been interested in, and the rest are Cs and low Bs. Even an F. I just can't bring myself to mundane, boring work. I know that people say I should learn to live with that, because life is filled with mundane work. But I've always been able to make money coding, etc. and loved every minute of it. I honestly feel like Uni is "harshing on my vibe, man" if you know what I mean. I could be learning so much more if I could spend less time with my Uni work :(

Aha, well that was as relevant to this post as I thought it would be when I started writing it. C'est la vie. HN is getting my rant anyways...

Our high school, Niskayuna High School in Upstate NY, has a policy (from what I've heard, it's fairly rare) called 'Open Enrollment'.

By this policy, any student can, in spite of the wishes of any teacher or department director, decide to take a class at a different level than recommended. Essentially, if you want to take the AP class, you can, even if your teacher tells you to take the remedial one. Nobody can force you not to.

I think its incredibly empowering. It makes school seem like a place of opportunity instead of a place of discouragement. As far as I know, 'Open Enrollment' (aka 'Self Selection') is not very widespread in high schools. I wish it was.

Frankly, I couldn't get past the grammar. And spelling. And blatant typos. You so lack an attention to detail that I wonder if you might have a learning disorder.

Or you don't read. Please read. Read everything you can. Read fiction, non-fiction, cereal boxes, "newspapers", graphic novels, the internet. Read anything. It's kata for communication. If you can't or won't read, you'll forever suffer from an inability to communicate effectively. You will feel this most acutely when communicating in written form, but incomplete or incorrect sharing of your context in any form will contribute to your perceived disease.

I liked your article, your persistence, and your confidence. Keep it up!

You should do some more editing (straight vs. strait, their vs. there, etc.), but that's an ancillary concern.

Some comments from another STEM undergraduate in the US: You're clearly someone who's a bigger fan of doing things via your own system versus flowing through others' systems. There's, of course, nothing wrong with that. Lots of hacker types have that tendency. Feynman used his own notation for trigonometric functions in high school because he thought the existing one was stupid. It's a handicap in many situations, but an advantage in many others. The world needs both kinds of people.

Anyway, point is, the traditional pathways to success are based on certain metrics, and people flowing through that pathway will optimize toward those metrics to the exclusion of others, inflating them (that's Goodhart's Law). You're someone with an aversion to traditional pathways who's trying to reach life goals through those pathways. The system wasn't made for people like you. This automatically puts you at a disadvantage, as your time and effort is spread out between a lot of things, only some of which help up the metric the grad school people are looking for.

So take a look at yourself and gauge your skills: you're obviously competent, you're intrinsically motivated, you're persistent, but you're bad at (or your life conditions preclude you from) optimizing to certain metrics. Given this information, if you want to do better, you can either give yourself a handicap (take less credit hours or easier classes) or change the game to something you're better at (look for less GPA-centric grad school programs, consider other future possibilities -- also see etrevino's comment!).

In the further future, look for smaller places and higher risk/reward scenarios. Working in those kinds of environments will let you take on challenges on your own terms. Finally, many of the problems you mentioned at college would be nonexistent at a smaller school. At a smaller place, people are more willing to bend rules and to make exceptions given extenuating circumstances. Keep that in mind when making future decisions.

Oh, and, yeah, the system is incredibly broken. So are a lot of things in life. the best we can do is often to work around them and push to change them, usually in that order.

Some places can be flexible about their entry requirements. If you're not against coming to the UK, try some places here, like Cambridge (much cheaper than ~all US schools). Don't just apply - contact specific supervisors about joining their groups. I can help guide you through this if you (or anyone) want to drop me an email.

As someone who bucked the traditional route to get here I can assure you it's feasible. I didn't go to university until I was 21 - and then I did a weird subject at an unheard of university. Now I'm a grad at Cambridge. If you don't like the system which is set up to select people who are likely to be good, then you have to work around it, not try to run straight through it. By applying the normal route you're guaranteeing yourself to get stuck. People are always the way around institutional rules - get to know some of them, help them to like you, then help them to help you.

Also, if you want to change the world with your skills, very few academic projects will let you do that. We're building a site that lets you find those projects and give your skills: http://solvers.io

I completely understand. What did I do? Got a job for someone who cares more about accomplishments than about some ridiculous method of measuring that meant nothing in any context but authoritarian measurement systems(do what we say to pass).

Upsides? If we make money, I am lauded and respected, and getting things done is the highest achievement. Downsides? Way too much time spent optimizing problems and dealing with bullshit that is unrelated to your interests.

Conclusion: no matter what path you choose, you have to yoke yourself to someone's wagon, whether it be academic or business. Otherwise hope you are born rich or have a billion dollar idea.

I also feel frustrated with and betrayed by the academic system, and while my reasons for feeling that way are somewhat different, the big picture is similar. I've worked hard and learned a lot and by some measures I am intelligent and educated, but I don't have the academic history to back it up. But... none of that matters, because I got a job where my actual skills and knowledge are valued, rather than my credentials. Is that a path you can take?

Oh and by the way... I see people picking on your grammar and spelling mistakes, but I really don't think they're any worse than what I see regularly elsewhere. I've read plenty of papers published by engineering and computer science graduate students that have been worse.

I graduated 2 years ago from the same school as OP. I had better GPA, simply because I learned to game the system and to be better at taking tests. When you realize the system (college now and graduate school soon) is not benefiting you, you might want to come to a different system (industry). I moved to SF after college. My day job keeps me interested in distributed system, while I spent my free time learning my favorite subject, combinatorics

School is not everything.

You are delusional and incredibly vain.

I use http://spellcheckplus.com/

"I'm commenting in Hacker News which means I have a minimum IQ of 120. But in no way my above statement proves my above average intellect which can be personified in this comment. But then some may say I'm arrogant or just trolling neither of which, this sentence is too long I'm gonna end it now."

Sorry, but I find it very difficult to understand how someone who can't even spell the word "straight" correctly could have gotten an A in English his senior year of high school. I'm pretty sure I knew how to spell that word correctly by the time I was 5 or 6.