

An Open Letter to Students Waiting for Their College Admissions Decisions - epall
http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/02/an-open-letter-to-students-waiting-for-their-college-admissions-decisions/

======
mmc
Some great advice. If you treat college as another means to an end, you might
become exactly what you wanted to be when you were 17. Interesting people I
know all agree that their 17-year-old self couldn't know what their 25 or 30
year-old self wanted.

Therefore, the best path is to get good grades, learn about what interests you
and otherwise, just concentrate on becoming your older self well. Sometimes
the order of those three is not as important.

~~~
tptacek
For the record, I'm doing what I hoped to be doing when I was 17. ;)

~~~
thwarted
As am I. Are we really that rare?

------
ErrantX
Some good advice there. I went through university (in the UK) with only a
medium amount of effort (I failed and had to do resit exams for 2 years) and
scraped out a 2:1. But because I had spent time playing around in areas that
interested me (aka security) finding a job afterwards was not difficult - I
had character and a feel for the job, my mediocre degree wasnt really a
factor.

A coursemate who spent a LOT of time working (and not socialising) got himself
a top grade 1st and is still (a year later) struggling to find work.

------
stanleydrew
The one thing to take away from this post is "Interesting things happen to
interesting people." Therefore make yourself interesting. Most of the rest of
it is extremely misleading.

As with most career/life advice, its relevance depends on what you want to
accomplish. The kind of broad "pursue a lot of different things" approach
advocated here is great for some people, but it definitely can limit your
opportunities. For instance, if you want to get into top PhD programs the
professors reviewing your application will care that you had a triple major
and took the hardest courses in your field. If you don't focus early, you'll
miss that opportunity.

The argument here is that college is too early a time to focus on one thing.
Even though I didn't, I disagree that this is generally good advice. There are
many ways to be interesting.

------
v4us
It's definitly amazing and true open letter

~~~
stanleydrew
I wouldn't call it amazing, but there is definitely some useful stuff in
there. I would distill the entire thing down to "engage with material that you
enjoy learning, and success will follow."

