
What I Learned In College - blackhole
http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-i-learned-in-college.html
======
jmduke
I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too.

I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's
a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on
my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never
teach me _faster_ than I can teach myself.

I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but
that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the
way.)

I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many
hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper.

I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for
fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video
game.)

I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best
when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's
outcomes.

I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I
benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who
always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it.

(I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my
life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea
that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in
contention with one another.)

~~~
Ixiaus
A few things formal institution graduates don't realize:

When you say "you're more or less paying for the piece of paper" you're taking
it for granted (unless you went to a shitty school). As an Autodidact in
Mathematics, programming, compsci, and psychology with nothing but a GED; you
underestimate the value of rigorous environments.

Learning fast is also not the point. Learning _thoroughly_ is the point.
Thorough and rigorous learning is _really fucking hard_ when an Autodidact.
University is an environment that allusively inspires rigor. You're surrounded
by peers _doing the same thing you are_ ; you have access to instructors that
are (sometimes) the best in their field; and you have access to facilities
(even as an alum!) that are prohibitively expensive for non-matriculating
learners.

Autodidacism is hard because you have to hold yourself to extremely high
standards, you have to play with your own psychology to control inspiration
and perseverance (you aren't accountable to anyone!!). So even if you learn on
your own now _after_ college you still will have a number tools at your
disposal that you would've had to develop on your own without college.

Yes, I learn far better on my own too, but _do not discount_ the enormous
opportunity you had by going through college.

~~~
jmduke
I completely agree with everything you said, particularly the difference
between learning quickly and learning thoroughly.

I'd love to hear more about your autodidacism. Do you mind explaining your
learning process a bit more?

~~~
ericabiz
I'm not Ixiaus but I am his best friend and co-founder (and totally going to
give him hell in the office tomorrow for posting on HN when he's supposed to
be on vacation. ;)

Anyway, he gets up at 6AM every day and runs through a spaced repetition
routine. He's written about his process here:
[http://ixmat.us/articles/2012-12-01_usable-org-
drill.html](http://ixmat.us/articles/2012-12-01_usable-org-drill.html)

------
navait
Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to
exactly his needs.

What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for
something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in
one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go
get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our
team!"

Get it out of your head that being smart entitles you to anything or makes you
special. You'll find your classmates aren't robots, and are just as smart as
you, and have a lot to offer.

~~~
blackhole
Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is
partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make
it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's
a disaster to everyone, not just me.

To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal
with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special
online high school and get tutoring help just to graduate. He is very bright,
but the system just crushes him because he can't operate within it very well
and the system doesn't care.

I did once try to get into research. Academic research has a whole boatload of
its own problems, including the professor/graduate student ponzi scheme and
the overemphasis on getting published. I decided doing research on my own
would be much more fruitful.

My classmates were usually quite smart. They were also usually just as
frustrated with the system as I was.

~~~
selimthegrim
You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved
research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of
scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in
academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit
out the marrow.

Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the
PhD system. However, meaningful research will require interaction with
interested colleagues to increase the chance of useful work being done. This
can take place independent of the so called Ponzi scheme. While there is some
truth to that description, it has no bearing on your refusal to engage with
research as an undergrad and is totally dilatory. If you hold yourself to such
high standards you should be ashamed to use that as an excuse.

~~~
blackhole
What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I
even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I
wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so
there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of
problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and
raytracing graphical techniques.

Grad school probably would have run me into the ground. It would have done so
for _all the wrong reasons_. Again, I'm not interested in a hyper-competitive
environment where I am judged on all the wrong things. I'd rather do my own
research, and have actually made progress along several avenues I'm quite
proud of, but currently haven't crystallized into something I can write a
paper about (also due to time constraints).

Stop glorifying long work hours. They aren't productive.

~~~
e3pi
Camp in 3rd floor Padelford Library.

If your code compiles, it's proved.

Oreilly titles, Stack Overflow, net et al >> `non-coder friends, chuckles, and
puppies'.

Play computer chess against `chess', not human limbic systems.

Original discovery is greater than a paycheck.

Have fun.

------
10098
What you learn in college/university depends only on yourself. Tests are just
the most convenient, unified way to measure students' progress. There are two
ways you can beat tests: one is to train specifically for the test, the other
is to actually know the subject.

The first way is easier, but leaves you with little residual knowledge, and
you don't even know how to apply that knowledge. The second way is much
harder, and it requires work on your part. However, it pays off. Not only you
get to pass the test, you're also now armed with useful knowledge.

At my time in university, I've taken both approaches towards various subjects.
For the algorithms class, I made a lot of effort to study and understand the
subject. Today, I still have it in my head, and can apply it when needed. For
differential equations, I just studied for the test. I don't remember anything
now, and it's my fault for being lazy. I got an "A" in both subjects, by the
way.

What I'm trying to say is, the system is just fine as long as qualified
professors are teaching. The problem is lazy students.

------
arikrak
>Any task that can be reduced to simply following a set of instructions over
and over is being done by robots and software.

Agreed. Along similar lines:

Any problem that can be solved with clearly-defined steps can be programmed so
that a computer can solve it. Many areas of education, especially math-related
ones, involve students learning to mechanically implement set procedures and
formulas to solve problems. These mechanical processes can all by definition
be solved by a computer, so why pretend that these technologies do not exist?
Human computers were once necessary, but they have since been supplanted.

[http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84](http://www.learneroo.com/courses/9/nodes/84)

~~~
sowhatquestion
I find it interesting there's one genre of indignant op-eds lamenting the
death of creativity in education (including this one--not saying it's bad or
formulaic, but it's definitely part of a genre).... and there's another genre
lamenting that most college graduates are getting Starbucks barista type jobs
that don't require creativity...

Much scarier than the idea that the education system is failing, is the idea
that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the increasingly meager role that our
society assigns it. As OP points out, there isn't a textbook with the answers
for meaningful real-world problems--but there is one that tells you precisely
how many pumps of chocolate syrup go in a grande mocha.

HN readers may be _a priori_ more prepared to accept the watered-down version
of this idea. "Of course the system needs creative problem solving, that's the
most important part of my job!" If this describes you, congratulations, you
are one of the priviliged few who has what the economist David Autor calls an
"analytic" job. In fact, it's increasingly likely that _the very purpose of
your job_ is to ensure that there's no middle ground between you and those
textbook-following Starbucks workers[1].

1: [http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-
jo...](http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-job-
destroyer/)

------
JMStewy
OP, from your description of your relationship with math in school I think you
would enjoy Lockhart's Lament (pdf warning):
[http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf](http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring
and vindicating when I found it.

------
blacksqr
"Sometimes you have to consider the possibility they are getting the results
they want." \--Atrios

------
mjmahone17
Holy crap, UW's CS only has 200 graduates per year? For a school of that size,
that's tiny. That's close to as many as most Ivy League schools these days,
and their undergrad population is usually around 1/5 that of UW. This is
especially sad, as CS courses should be pretty easy to scale, especially when
you have a group of undergrads who want to teach. Not to mention how
hypercompetitiveness drives out diversity, especially of minds, because the
more competitive it is, the more of the "correct" hoops you have to jump
through. This means that, if you struggle in math but are highly artistic, and
could bring a different perspective to your courses, you're effectively shut
out.

~~~
AlexanderMiller
I was an undergrad TA for the intro CSE classes at UW, and I was impressed by
the way the courses were run and proud to be a part of it, so it hurts me to
read comments like this.

You're right, there is a large pool of undergrads who want to teach, and the
department takes full advantage of that. Unlike every other department at UW
(that I know of), CSE pays undergrads to teach section (20 student classes
that supplement the main lectures). Around 50 to 80 undergrads teach every
quarter.

Furthermore, the instructors are _insanely_ dedicated to diversity of minds.
They constantly try to incorporate different ways of thinking into their
courses to encourage students who might not be the math-y or computer-y types
to understand their own potential. As evidence of this: the principal lecturer
of the intro classes, Stuart Reges, gives keynote speeches at educational
conferences on the success of the UW CSE program in attracting and retaining
women in CSE. There is a huge amount of diversity among CSE majors -- double
majors in art, business, math, linguistics, etc.

The problem is funding. Even though there is a huge demand for CSE degrees,
the department doesn't have enough money to provide them. There's talk now of
implementing differential tuition at UW, meaning that majoring in a high-
demand field will cost you more than majoring in a low-demand one. This might
allow the CSE department to fulfill the demand, but who knows if it's really a
good idea.

Sorry for the long winded reply! Didn't mean for this to stretch out. I guess
I took your comment a little too personally. :)

------
tehwalrus
This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we
need is a _better_ large-scale education system - telling everyone to think
for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people
(teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy.

(even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers
to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade
political systems to actually act on this.)

I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge
_mocked_ answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-
optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with
professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk
you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you
understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week,
excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an
independent project and that took up some time slots.

Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this _in spite_ of the prevailing education
climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try
and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.

------
dev1n
_The greatest challenge our species has ever faced is the educational system
itself._

Almost. John Steinbeck said it best, IMO, "We now face the danger which has
been the most destructive to the humans. Success, comfort, and ever increasing
leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."

------
azurelogic
I had a very similar experience in undergrad. I skipped all sorts of classes
and got great grades. I didn't care. I put off studying weeks of material
until days before the exam. I'd even have a beer or 2 before exams. It wasn't
stimulating. For me, part of that was because I was doing the wrong thing the
whole time. I was studying biochem when I should have been learning to code.
When I went back for my masters in CS, I actually tried and cared. I think I
missed 3 classes the whole time and only because I was too sick to go. Passion
for becoming the best programmer I could be drove me to try harder and harder.
While I know that school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about
software development, I refused to let anything that I could learn slip by.

------
AlexanderMiller
How would you design the CSE admissions process? What would you change? Have
you considered the pressure and lack of resources the admissions committee is
forced to deal with? What about the students who received 4.0's in all intro
math and computer science classes? Why should the department devote precious
educational resources to you, rather than to them?

We all wish that CSE was an open major at UW. But you're ignoring a huge
amount of complex practical issues when you blame bureaucracy. You offer
simplistic criticism but no solutions.

~~~
blackhole
The CSE program does not use its funding very well. This is not something I
claim, it's something a CSE professor told me when I pointed out various
shortcomings, and he agreed with many of them but was not in a position to do
anything about it. That said, the CSE program doesn't have enough funding in
the first place, either. That's the primary issue.

------
alexgartrell
It's really hard to not come across as ad hominem when you're disagreeing with
OP's take on a personal experience, but I have very little patience for
someone who sees or experiences something negative and does nothing more that
cry into the wind. Fix the bug or find a work around. Lots of people managed
to have great and very useful and applicable college experiences (I did) so
maybe it's the OP who is wrong?

------
cafard
Useless facts are useless if not not organized (by the learner) into a useful
structure. My impression is that a lot of schools have responded to this not
by helping the students to organize the facts but by going light on facts
instead.

------
switch33
I've talked to Erik on a few occasions. And I think he is extremely bright and
seeing someone pour over with enthusiasm like him is what motivates me to do
better programming wise.

In response here are a few things I think people should consider:

It seems to me that the GPA requirements for computer science are being made
pretty strict in response to trying to get the students to take other paths
because some colleges don't want to have so many computer science major
students. This seems like a problem because these colleges are not really
adapting to the situation and are instead just trying to push students to
other curriculum by making the grade requirements much stricter for certain
majors.

I think math in college is probably much better than it was in middleschool as
well. I definitely agree I hated repeating multiplication tables and all that.
It just was not fun. And it did not even feel like learning. I think there are
many people who are interested in math and will not really know it till they
read more about the different subjects that are in it.

Theres no easy answers in education like there is no easy answers in
government policy. It's just too much generalization that cannot be
quantified. The abstraction in some college classes has gotten me a bit
annoyed since the teachers almost do not consider the other students.

One case is where I had a teacher who on the last day of class changed the
main assignment of the whole class to be more clearly worded in a really bad
way. He failed to provide adequate time for students mainly.

On the last day of class he decided that students writing a group assignment
should only hand in 1 group assignment (with no instruction about how one
person can remove a copy of the assignment turned in through blackboard). When
a group of 4 people has to coordinate anything in less than a single day it's
an idiots game.

My main compliant- This could have been much easier if he just graded the
latest turned in papers. Or he graded the earliest ones. It wouldn't have
mattered that much to some, but he really threw a bunch of his students under
the bus for a grading policy that was rather unreasonable. Instead he decided
to deduct 10% off that grade because of some rule he made up in the last day
of a 6 week class that was unfair because he did not provide adequate
instruction.

Simple Game Theory will tell you something will go wrong in such a small time
frame with no information. Unfortunately, my college was silly enough to not
want to fix this huge blunder an professor made. In my honest opinion even the
basics of game theory should be taught to teachers and people looking to go
into politics. People need to understand there is a reasoning policy behind
different actions. Even if it's a non-mathematical introduction to game-theory
for the most part. People need to realize there are smarter ways of getting
people motivated to do things which may be better than what they are thinking.

------
nnoitra
It's about the environment and the people that surround you. It's not all
about learning. It never was.

------
calhoun137
The most important thing I learned in college was how to learn things on my
own.

------
nickthemagicman
Does the fact the his avatar is fluttershy kind of ruin his credibility to
anyone else?

~~~
msutherl
The fact that you know its name ruins _your_ credibility.

~~~
zanny
He got it wrong, that is an OC to my knowledge. None of the major main cast
are male ponies, and that isn't one of the side characters I know of. So
consider his credibility untarnished.

~credibility is for curmudgeons.

~~~
roryokane
I can confirm that his avatar is an original character. I don’t recognize it,
having watched most of the show, and it’s not on
[http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies](http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies).

