Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

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One thing that's missing here is that college really is a "you get out what you get in" situation. As a prof, you see people like this all the time, and hopefully you take the time to try and engage them more, but at the end of the day it isn't your responsibility if they choose to waste the opportunity. The "challenge" in college isn't to make a 4.0 GPA, it's to push yourself to find your own boundaries. Many profs will bend over backwards to help a student who is doing this, and (unlike high school) you can scale up your program to meet and exceed any persons abilities.

Sure, maybe you can skate by and manage a decent GPA, but you aren't doing yourself any favors, your basically telling us that you half assed four years of personal development, and you should know that it is probably obvious to those you've worked with and for. The corporate world has its share of people too, skating just like they were. Typically they are the ones not being considered for rapid advancement and grooming for bigger things.

Of course, you may just be exceptional. And it's not like you can't recover from this with hard work. But consider this as you head out on your own: Sometimes you just get lucky, but it's more likely that you will succeed or fail now largely on the back of hard work (and here's the tricky part) applied to the right places. Consider an alternative universe "you" who grabbed hold of college with both hands and squeezed until it gave up as much useful stuff as it could....

That guy would be eating your lunch right now. Not because of the college, per se, but because of the attitude and experience.

I agree in principle...but in practice I think college is much less of an opportunity to make it what you want it to be than you make it out to be. Perhaps at a graduate level or at a top level school you can learn more if you apply yourself more, but at a regular state school, it was really just an extension of high school. I left with the opinion that liberal arts is just a repeat of everything you were supposed to learn during middle and high school with longer papers and more reading, but really just the same content. The only students who had trouble either 1.) Didn't actually pay attention in middle or high school or 2.) Couldn't read or work fast enough to keep up. The major classes were really pretty easy as well as a computer science major, but that's because I was already a programmer...I suppose that's not the norm. At least towards the end, I put a lot of work into it and read pretty much every page, but didn't get a lot out of it.

Many of the same problems plague colleges that plague high schools though...professors that either don't care or aren't very good at teaching, students that are just there for the degree, books that don't really challenge, and papers that just require following the formula "5 paragraphs, 3 summary sentences". Very little learning took place for me in any of that. The learning I did was from outside of college and was from learning what is considered generally graduate school work for C.S.

I really hope that most people's experiences aren't that way, and that colleges do teach young people. It just wasn't my experience through 3 different colleges. An Oxford style school with mentors and customized content probably would have served me much better than colleges that continue on the same factory system setup that is broken at the lower levels.

The workplace hasn't been difficult for me, but I definitely learn a lot more than I ever did in school. I come across actual challenges that require research and stretch me. Perhaps that's just being a software engineer though.

Well, I think that theoretical guy would just be succeeding in a different industry than the one I happened to succeed in so far.

It's not like I didn't apply myself to anything, just not to schoolwork; except when I found a class interesting. As it turns out, the things I did apply myself to became my career rather than what I had gone to school for.

There's a large difference between "half assed four years of personal development" and simply concentrating more on things that are unrelated to your official studies.

In fact, one of the big reasons I'm striking out on my own (well, as part of a team) now is that I realized my day job was no longer providing me with nearly as much opportunity for personal development as it had during the first few years I worked there.

Edit: And the fact that it's entirely what you make of it isn't what's told to the 18 & 19 year olds heading off to college (at least not in the circle's I was in). What's told to kids is that it's the piece of paper that matters in today's society. Once you get it, you can do anything you want, but make sure you get that piece of paper or all opportunity will shut down for you forever and for always.

What causes these situations is the combined narrative that the piece of paper is what matters alongside the fact that getting that piece of paper is a highly gameable activity.

Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have. You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you are trying to do.

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