
Correlation between taking a break from school and startup success? - omarish

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omarish
Startups are all about dedication/motivation. Also about creating dedication
and motivation where it is necessary, when we do not care for it anymore. That
explains why even when we're sick of our startups, we keep pushing onwards.

Could this mean that founders who can create motivation can also create
motivation to finish at least an undergrad degree?

You guys may have noticed a common theme in my posts...

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BrandonM
The problem with motivation for an undergrad is when you realize that
everything doesn't need to be the way it is now. Let me clarify. Most of us
have been raised our whole lives with the mantra, "You have to go to college
to succeed." I know that my parents didn't go to college, and they were always
saying, "You don't want to end up where I am, working in a factory," etc.

The problem with that model, however, is that a standard undergraduate
education is beginning to become old-fashioned and irrelevant. How many
stories do you hear about students going to four years of school only to
graduate and be unable to find employment? While the problem is not nearly as
bad in engineering as in other fields, it's still the case that more and more
people are going to college, and as a result, a degree doesn't look nearly as
great as it did 20 or 30 years ago.

I personally have started to become disenfranchised with the college model in
the US. As an undergrad, I have visited some undergraduate committee meetings
and talked personally with a few professors, and the bureaucracy of the whole
thing is somewhat disgusting. Even if a professor wants to make a change to
the curriculum (for the better), he or she must endure countless meetings and
votes, even for something that is clearly a good idea. It may take a year or
more just to make a minor structural change in a few core courses.

Moreover, department heads are not much worried about the success (or lack
thereof) of undergrads. For whatever reason, national groups that rank
colleges look mainly at entrance criteria, so as long as the college can
successfully lock out those students with low ACT scores (which are largely
irrelevant), they look good on paper. Meanwhile, they hire new professors
based _only_ on their research and some interviews, without much regard for
teaching backgrounds.

In the end, once you go off and create your own startup and work on your own
projects, you start to see that college is largely not helpful to an
undergrad. The stuff that is stretched out over four years could probably be
learned quite easily by most in two or less, if it was all restructured a bit.
College, in effect, is just another corporation, one that is in the business
of paying professors and researching new ideas. It just happens that most
professors do not produce enough ideas quickly enough to justify their income,
so undergraduate students make up for that by paying tuition.

Once you realize that you can be successful without completing (or even
starting) your undergrad, the dedication, motivation, and finances necessary
to complete college just don't look like such a good trade anymore. Most
courses follow a textbook, anyways, so just buy the textbook, study it
yourself, talk to people online, and you will probably do just as well. The
only downside is that you'll be missing that shiny piece of paper.

~~~
BrandonM
I just realized that I did leave a few things out that would be missed by not
attending college. The first is that there are some interesting professors who
are genuinely interested in teaching and give wonderful lectures. Secondly,
some classes are structured to allow intelligent class interaction, and it can
be enlightening to participate in a good discussion to see the diverse
viewpoints that fellow classmates can offer. Last, but certainly not least, pg
has pointed out in several writings that college is a great place to meet a
co-founder. So there are a few other things that will be missed in addition to
"that shiny piece of paper."

