
How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known As a Freshman - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2010/09/26/how-universities-work-or-what-i-wish-i%e2%80%99d-known-freshman-year-a-guide-to-american-university-life-for-the-uninitiated/
======
jseliger
A bit of background: I wrote this because a lot of my students say things
like, "You teach AND take classes?" and call me "Dr." or "Professor" when I'm
technically not, although many of their other instructors are PhDs and
professors. As noted in the essay, such experiences made me realize that I
didn't know a lot about universities when I started in one either.

So now I direct people who ask me what this grad student business is to the
essay, which has been on my private course sites for a long time but which
I've finally decided to make public.

Note: if you have feedback, I'd love to hear it, especially if you're an
undergrad (two of my former students read "How Universities Work" and said it
made sense; the changes that resulted were relatively minor). If you want to
send msgs privately, try seligerj [[at]] gmail --dot-- com.

~~~
araneae
Since you asked for feedback...

Your statement that all T.A.s do care _a little_ about teaching is false. I
was a T.A. that Did Not Care. There were no consequences to doing poorly, and
student grades were controlled across T.A.s so my performance could have no
affect on student performance.

Also? Be nice to your T.A. Sometimes I was allowed to wildly inflate grades
for students who were enthusiastic/tried hard. Sometimes not. But it can't
hurt.

Another random piece of advice I would give is for students to take sections
later in the week rather than earlier. My first section was always a disaster,
I had no idea what I was doing.

If there is a rubric, follow it to the letter, and don't try to be creative.
Rubrics are for larger classes to make the grading even, and they are followed
exactly. I knew an A paper from a B paper, but sometimes A papers got Bs and B
papers got As because of the stupid rubric (or worse...)

~~~
jseliger
_Your statement that all T.A.s do care a little about teaching is false._

From the essay:

 _To be sure, there are exceptions: some professors will be hostile or
uninterested regardless of how much effort a student shows, and some will be
martyrs who try to reach even the most distant, disgruntled student. But most
professors are in the middle, looking for students who are engaged and
focusing on those students._

------
onan_barbarian
Spot on. The 'how do I get an A' question always seemed to be on the lips of
everyone who never seemed to want to do the thing consensus reality suggested
you might have to do to get one (turn up, pay attention, work hard, ...)

Computer Science, particularly, has a problem with bright students who managed
to blaze through their first-year courses with a 4.0, expending absolutely no
effort at all. This is because they already know how to program and are often
inculcated with enormously broad knowledge of CS as compared with their peers.

Many of them also know dangerous portions of typical second-year subjects -
e.g. just enough to regard their second-year algorithms or operating systems
courses as 'oh, this is just like first year, I know this'. Unfortunately,
this often refers to the first 20-25% of the course, not all of it, and maybe
not even that.

Some of them never quite seem to recover and start regarding the marks they
get as arbitrary personal judgements of their character ('you gave me a bad
mark because I'm smarter than you and you hate me') or as failings in the
system ('you gave me a bad mark because this course is in ML and ML is
stupid').

Naturally none of this is helped by the fact that there are copious actual
failings in the system. The hours of my software engineering course spent on
the waterfall model (back in the early 90s), or mind-numbing lectures on the
Seven Deadly Layers of OSI, are hours I'll never get back...

~~~
arethuza
Don't first year CS courses usually share the same maths classes as first year
engineering? Pretty difficult to "blaze through" that purely on prior
programming knowledge (believe me, I tried and almost got kicked out of the
course I did for failing maths).

~~~
onan_barbarian
True enough. I mainly meant 4.0 in their CS courses, although some have
overlap between advanced HS math and first-year university math.

~~~
arethuza
My fault I think, being British I have no idea of the significance of the 4.0
thing :-)

------
gamble
One thing I would add is that if you have any interest in graduate school,
it's important to become involved in research ASAP. Research experience is an
important differentiator on grad school applications and scholarships, but
it's a rare school that will warn you about that before senior year, when it's
already too late.

~~~
jimmyjim
Any tips on landing a decent internship position in researches headed by
different universities? I am currently attending an institution where the
highest level of education offered is a masters... so there's no research
going on here. But I do live nearby a univ. where there is. Do I just e-mail
one of the professors there, speak a little about myself, and just sort of say
"I'm interested in becoming involved in the research you head"?

And actually, furthermore _deciding_ what sort of research I should get myself
involved in. Does it even matter? -- in line of what jseliger and pg said
about choosing majors -- that it doesn't matter, because the more important
skills are easily translatable into different fields.

~~~
jseliger
"Do I just e-mail one of the professors there, speak a little about myself,
and just sort of say "I'm interested in becoming involved in the research you
head"?"

Funny -- I actually wrote another essay called "How to Get Your Professors'
Attention" on this subject. Some friends are reading it right now, and I wrote
it in response to some of the things I've read on HN.

In any event, if you're trying to get in another lab, I'd try something like
this:

1) Find the list of the profs and/or their websites.

2) Look at their research. You might not understand a lot of it, but try to
get a sense of what they're doing.

3) Try to read some of their recent papers. You might not understand a lot of
them, either, so look at the bibliographies: figure out if there are any
seminal papers in the field that are cited that you might have a better shot
at understanding. Alternately, try to look for a more accessible source of
information on the topic. Profs at your own university might be good for that.

4) _Then_ send them an e-mail saying, "I'm interested in subject X and read Y
and Z. I've done A and B to learn more about this subject. Can I drop by your
office hours to talk it over with you?"

Almost all profs will have office hours.

5) Part of your goal should be to signal that you're not going to waste the
prof's time. One way you can do this is by showing that you've invested some
amount of your own time. Profs quickly discover that most people who claim
they want to learn don't and that most people who implicitly claim they won't
waste their time will.

If you want to see a draft of the essay I mentioned, send me an e-mail.

 _Does it even matter? -- in line of what jseliger and pg said about choosing
majors -- that it doesn't matter, because the more important skills are easily
translatable into different fields._

Look for what interests you, and do that. What you major in does matter
somewhat -- if you want to be an economist, I wouldn't recommend that you
single major in art history, and if you want to be a psychologist, electrical
engineering might be less useful than some other fields. But people say things
like, "You'll be unemployable if you major in X," or "smart people only major
in Y," and in those senses what you major in doesn't always matter.

When in doubt, build your reading/writing and math skills, since those are
applicable to nearly everything.

~~~
jimmyjim
>If you want to see a draft of the essay I mentioned, send me an e-mail.

Sure, I'd love to have a look at it. I've just sent you an e-mail (on your
gmail address listed on your blog-site).

Thanks!

~~~
jseliger
I sent it.

Oh yeah -- also see pg's undergraduation: <http://paulgraham.com/college.html>
, which is on point here. I think in some essay he points out that if you want
to work in a lab, you need to convince the prof that you'll be a net decrease
in work. This is harder than it might appear.

------
yummyfajitas
Another thing: assume that the people designing the curriculum _might_
possibly know a little more than you do about what subjects are useful later
on. I.e., don't say stuff like this:

"But why do I need to learn about matrices? I'm a meteorology major! We don't
use matrices at all, it's all just partial derivatives!"

(This is an actual complaint I received when TAing ODE's, which was required
by the meteorology major. I didn't even bother explaining how you discretize a
linear PDE into a system of ODE's, or why that matters for weather prediction,
I just referred her to her department head. )

~~~
gamble
By the time I reached the senior year of my EE degree, I was terribly
impressed with how neatly the prerequisite courses slotted into requirements
of later classes. It's a shame that the reasoning is opaque until you've
already been through the program. If I was in charge of the program, I'd give
every freshman a manual summarizing the content of each class up to the junior
year, and why they should know it.

~~~
nitrogen
Something like this would certainly have helped me during high school and
university, but I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves
by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school
and learn the exact same material on their own.

~~~
jseliger
_I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves_

This kind of thought process is strange to my way of thinking but plausible;
very few teachers I ever had said, "Hey, this is why we're doing what we're
doing and why it's important," which is part of the reason I make a point of
saying exactly that in the classes I teach. One favorite question: "Why are we
reading this, as opposed to something else? What are you supposed to take from
it?"

 _by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school
and learn the exact same material on their own._

This seems implausible: if students came in already well-prepared or overly
advanced for the classes I teach (chiefly Engl composition), I'd be delighted.
By now I've taught about ~250 students, and somewhere between 1 and 6 haven't
really needed a comp class. Probably only 1. But I can guarantee that more
than 6 have _thought_ they didn't need a comp class...

HN has a lot of talk about being self-motivated, and learning on your own, and
so forth, which I think is great. But standing in front of a classroom makes
me think that the number of people who will really do this is not very great,
especially without deadlines and so forth to motivate them (for more on this,
see Dan Ariely's book _Predictably Irrational_).

That's not to say the number of very self-motivated people who could acquire
the knowledge that school imparts on their own is zero. It isn't. But it's
really, really small, which is part of the reason school systems are shaped as
they are.

------
dnautics
Not nearly cynical enough. A lot of the things written here are sort of the
'ideal'. The fact of the matter is, if you want to be a chemist, you probably
shouldn't be anything but a chemistry major (or something related enough, or
effectively complete the chemistry reqs). I don't know that colleges are
'places where knowledge is created'. In retrospect, I feel like colleges are
places where people get that A (i.e. a college diploma) to prove they've been
there - and to gain qualifiaction in the eyes of the outside world.

Whether or not that should be the case, that seems to be the way that it is.

The Paul Krugman quote is shudder-worthy, but that is a personal bias.

~~~
barrkel
Re creating knowledge, it depends on the specialism. In a lot of computer
science, I feel that university is perhaps one third ad-hoc / industrial
trends and practices getting formalized; one third blue skies work of a some
relevance, though by the time it becomes relevant is quickly overtaken by
industry; and one third useless formalizations generation, more exercises in
rigour (or not) for their formulators than measurable knowledge.

~~~
dnautics
...It actually probably more depends on the school.

To a certain degree there are computer science programs where the net result
is large-scale training in collaborative development. At the university where
I worked, there was a graduate CS class where over the course of 10 weeks they
rewrote the transportation department's website (enabling real-time tracking
of campus busses and wi-fi base stations in all the busses).

However, I was a chemistry/math major as an undergrad, at a primarily research
institution. I imagine chemistry departments at primarily undergrad
institutions were probably not as involved in the process of "knowledge
creation" - that's what REUs were for - and who can say about the humanities
and political science?

------
Tycho
I think there is a growing apathy between undergraduates and there teachers:
the students don't quite see the point of slavishly attending lectures when
the same information is readily available online or in the library, while
lectureres don't see why they should try harder to engage students when they
constantly turn up late, don't pay attention, or skip classes entirely.

I don't know if it's always been like this. My undergrad uni seemed to have
_recently_ added actual credit for mere attendance. One of the modules
reportedly only had a tenth of the people show up (I didn't realise this cause
I ditched it after the first two lecture which were exceptionally dull and
unenthusiastic). My postgraduate class consisted of a room half full of
foreign students who talked _all_ lecture. I don't know if there's cynicism
amng academics about their students, or some sort of undying optimism. I
suspect they say "unbelievable now lazy they're getting, how lax the standards
are, how ignorant..." when we're not there.

And then there's the tutorials: 90% of the time they were a joke. Even the
better ones where some active discussion transpired, I wasn't convinced of
their actual value beyond entertainment.

------
ams6110
_The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that
universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are
designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you
far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of
intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity._

I found that this to be vary a lot from department to department. First of
all, undergraduate programs across the board are largely about disseminating
knowledge, as a foundation to be able to create new knowledge later as a
graduate student or researcher. As far as similarity to high school, I found
that business school undergraduate classes in particular were very much like
high school just on a larger scale: attendance taken, assigned seats, required
homework, etc. Classes in the Math or science departments were more likely to
leave it all up to the student: grades were based solely on performance on
exams. Humanities courses were somewhere in between those extremes.

One thing not mentioned in this piece, as an undergraduate it is much easier
to establish a high GPA your first two years than it is to bring up a low GPA
as a junior or senior. You don't do this so you can "coast" later, but because
your 3rd and 4th year classes in your major are going to be hard, or at least
quite time-consuming. If you have a high GPA coming in to your junior year,
you don't have to worry so much about the stray required electives you are
still finishing off, at the expense of the subjects you are really interested
in.

------
sofal
_When you ask how you get an “A,” they’re likely to be annoyed because you’re
indicating you don’t care about learning, which is the best way to earn an A._

I cannot stand it when a professor says that the best way to get an A is to
learn. It shows a fundamental ignorance about their own system of instruction.

If there is anything I've learned about universities, it is that learning is
at best orthogonal to getting an A. More often you have to actively sabotage
your actual learning in order to get an A.

When you get excited about a subject enough to explore it on your own, you
will almost inevitably end up either spending too much time on one part of the
curriculum or neglecting the rote memorization and tedious busy work that is
necessary to get an A. Classes are just small factories, treating and
evaluating every student the same way. It is and ever was a game of points and
percentages. If you want "learning" out of this, you need to balance it with
playing the game.

Professors have either never known this or have completely forgotten it. They
constantly whine about how students seemingly strive to get the least out of
their education as possible by taking as many shortcuts as they can. What they
fail to realize is that all of their classes are set up as silly little point
games, and each student has about 5 or 6 of them. Then they give out so many
busy work assignments and so much reading per class that it is impossible to
accomplish it all. The students are essentially learning how to prioritize and
cut out all of the unnecessary fat in order to maximize their _points_.
They're kept so busy that they don't even know that they're not really
maximizing for learning. Learning is not what the professors tell them to do.
Learning is not what the professors hold over their heads. They live by
points, and die by points. It takes a special student to pull his/her head out
of this firehose of tasks and decide to pursue their own education.

So Bob the student comes into class and he hasn't done the reading. Why?
Because he has spent 102% of his time on the various homeworks and
deliverables for this and other classes -- the stuff that actually has an
effect on the bottom line: his grade. He'd sure like to do the reading, but he
knows that he can get the assignments done just as well without it, and so it
goes to the bottom of the priority list. He will never get around to doing the
reading, because the list of grade-impacting busy-work deliverables will never
cease.

The professors then complain about the students like Bob, who don't seem to
want to actively explore their subject. They complain about the work of their
own hands, the inevitable result of their own system. The professor actively
molds students to be this way, and then they complain about it.

That is what I wish I'd known as a freshman.

~~~
psyklic
It sounds like Bob overloaded his schedule. Or, more likely, he's been
partying all night and placed his priorities elsewhere. Most students tend to
procrastinate to the last second then whine that they "didn't have time" to
get the assignment done, muchless the reading. And that is the sad truth.

Anyhow, points are a game that even the best students get sucked into playing.
We are not passionate about every subject, obviously. So, play the points game
for subjects you don't care about, then really try and learn for the subjects
you do care about. It will only help your grade, and you might find some
friends and supporters along the way too.

~~~
Groxx
Some, certainly, but not all by any means. Try doing well in an art / music
field, both of which _require_ many many many hours outside of class -
typically more than 2x the hour load - _and_ learning more abstract skills
like math or coding. The stuff you can sacrifice a _little_ becomes the stuff
you sacrifice.

For instance: across _two_ projects in _two_ classes, I've clocked over 1000
hours. Both classes had 3 (shorter) projects, and I had three other courses at
the same time.

And that wasn't my busiest semester. _That_ one had 21 credits - one of which
was an internship - and a part time job. (not recommended _under any
circumstance_ , btw)

------
Zev
_To get that A/B/C, demonstrate that you’re interested in the material, do all
the reading, and show up to class every day. Go to the professor’s office
hours to ask intelligent questions—like whether you’re on the right track
regarding a paper—or what you could’ve done better on a quiz._

I never find myself doing this with a CS class. I always show up right before
class starts, answer a few questions to show the professor I haven't zoned out
in front of my laptop and leave once class ends. Talking to others in the
class, they pretty much did the same. What we were covering always seemed
pretty set in stone. The complexity of mergesort won't change and its rather
easy to see how it differs from quicksort, for a contrived example.

However, when I had International Studies as my second major, I found myself
in professors offices a lot more. The politics behind everything at the level
we were looking at things on was much easier to find questions to explore than
CS was. And even more so with the art classes that I'm in right now. I'll stay
after class to work on something, show up before class to talk to others and
see how their project is coming along (and theirs is usually in a completely
different direction than mine). I'd ask the professors if they knew of any
artists who had made similar works that I could look at, etc.

------
somabc
This all very useful information and well written but I have to ask, do
undergraduates really not know this or at least figure it out very quickly? I
would expect students who are investing large sums of money to be better
prepared than just turning expecting High School plus with a generous helping
of A's them a nice job? Perhaps it is different in the USA than elsewhere?

~~~
kd0amg
_I would expect students who are investing large sums of money to be better
prepared_

So did I. I spent a lot of time during high school looking over options of
where to study. When I enrolled, I knew almost as much about the CS
department's course offerings and degree programs as the faculty did as well
as what courses I would take to fulfill my general education requirements. I
was very confused at the large proportion of students I encountered who knew
very little about the teachings their departments (and the university)
offered. While I now acknowledge that this is the way things are, I still do
not understand why. I have not determined whether this correlates with the
degree to which students put effort into their own education; this should make
for some interesting conversations (I think I'll start with my brother).

~~~
jseliger
_While I now acknowledge that this is the way things are, I still do not
understand why._

I'll posit some reasons:

I didn't know what I wanted to major in or what I wanted to study. This is
very common, as is switching majors. It's also hard to evaluate schools
because so many factors go into a decision: large or small school, big
university or small college, scholarships, tuition costs, geographic
proximity, faculty sizes, student culture... the list goes on. And the people
choosing are 17- and 18-year-olds, most of whom aren't particularly well
formed or knowledgeable about their interests. There's a reason why you're
supposed to discover yourself at the university: because most people don't
know themselves before they go. There's a reason why the bildungsroman is such
a popular genre: most people go through phases when growing up and learning
about the world. Maybe you did so earlier than most. I didn't.

I also think that most people are bad at anticipating what their future selves
will want. That also applies to me, and my feeling has been reinforced by
books like Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd's _The Time Paradox_, in which they
talk about time preferences and how those change. One reason I like Paul
Graham's "What You'll Wish You'd Known": <http://paulgraham.com/hs.html> is
the hang glider metaphor: you don't know where you'll want land, so stay
upwind.

If you _knew_ that you wanted to be a CS major _and_ you stayed in that major
throughout your college experience, you're in the minority of students.

------
Locke1689
Very well written, I like it. I wish more articles were proofed like this one
probably was.

------
jschuur
There's nothing about getting laid in there. What's up with that?

~~~
jseliger
Upvoted for being funny -- I can only say that it's beyond the scope of this
article, which isn't to denigrate its importance.

------
HectorRamos
Interesting read, but he lost me when he said astronomy was useless, a few
paragraphs after he talked about how professors would feel immensely insulted
if anyone called their subject boring or useless.

~~~
jseliger
Notice the context:

 _I tried and found that there is virtually no negotiating with requirements,
even if some are or seem silly. For example, Clark required that students take
“science perspective.” In studying my schedule and options, I figured that
astronomy was the easiest way out. Considering how useless astronomy looked, I
decided to petition the Dean of Students to be excused from it so I could take
better classes, arguing that I’d taken real science classes in high school and
that I could be more productively engaged elsewhere. The answer came quickly:
“no.”_

Considering how useless astronomy looked _in the context of taking it merely
to fulfill a requirement of limited utility_ , I didn't especially want to
take it, but I took it, fulfilled the requirement, and continued.

Astronomy is a lovely subject, like many subjects, but it's not one that I
desperately wanted to learn about then, and the class was mostly a waste.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I noticed that too. I'm sure you could have found a more interesting (to you)
way to get that credit - but then again, _errare humanum est_ and I've
certainly made my own share of mistakes.

------
zeynel1
"Tests asked things like the size of each planet—in other words, to
regurgitate facts that one can find in two seconds on Google, which is how I
found out what the Kuiper Belt is again."

Isn't this true for the entire undergraduate curriculum?

"The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that
universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are
designed to disseminate existing knowledge"

This is wrong. There are no "new knowledge" in undergraduate level.

~~~
eitally
That isn't true. There most certainly can be new knowledge at the
undergraduate level, and increasingly many schools are encouraging or
requiring real research projects for both BAs and BS degrees. My wife was
published for her biology thesis on petroleum consuming microbes and I was for
my research & exhibit on the commercialization (via ephemera) of Thomas
Jefferson since his death. That said, my actual thesis, on the impact of
popular music on public opinion during WWI, was completely regurgitated hash.
However, my university has an enormous collection of period sheet music so it
was a lot of fun to research and I don't regret it at all. Hopefully my thesis
advisor didn't, either. :)

~~~
zeynel1
Well, thanks for the examples; and interesting research as well.

I was thinking more about physics. I believe that it takes longer for a
student to reach the original research stage in physics.

