

Let's Not Completely Give Up on College - dlevine
http://blog.thirdyearmba.com/not-everyone-should-attend-college-but-lets-n

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Locke1689
College is useful for people who want to make the best of it. My freshman year
here I got involved with a research group examining virtualization in high
performance computing (supercomputing). By the end of my freshman year I had
helped write a big patch for QEMU to virtualize Intel HW instructions and
implemented the software compatibility layer for Intel in our own virtual
machine monitor. In addition to the invaluable experience this gave me
(especially in practical C) I also appeared as a coauthor on the VMM paper in
a very prestigious systems conference (IPDPS).

In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter
and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at
Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a
Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer.

This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration
at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the
International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking
competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with
Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and
will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result.

Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming
languages.

If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with
me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.

~~~
nupark2
Your experience sounds great.

I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I _do_ believe we must
abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can
accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence,
and ultimately, their value.

For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more
individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you
have.

I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where
two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally,
I'm a fan of the second theory:

[http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand)

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amirhhz
I really sympathise with the point made about allowing yourself (at least) a
year to "mature" and/or figure out, even to a small degree, what direction you
want to take your life in before going to University. I think if I'd done that
I would have been a lot less susceptible to upvoting all the recent "HE is a
waste of time" articles.

Philosophically (and practically), not so sure about trying to fix higher
education through purely economic/business terms, but then I'm no expert on
it.

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bluejeansummer
This is something I needed to hear. I'm considering dropping out of college
after only finishing one year. I never felt any motivation towards school, as
my grades reflect. I've been trying to decide whether dropping out and trying
to find work with a small startup would give my life the meaning and
motivation it sorely lacks.

Does this community have any advice?

~~~
mechanical_fish
A) It is early June. Presumably you are not going back to school until
September. Make the most of the next three months. Then decide in September.

A rough rule of thumb: If you can't find paying work in software, or at least
get yourself on a road that will obviously lead to paying work in software in
short order (i.e. build and launch something!) in the next three months you'd
probably be wise to go back to school.

B) What are you studying? Might you rather be studying something else? Are you
at the right school? There are other schools: Cheaper ones, larger ones,
smaller ones, more serious ones, less serious ones.

I have no experience with being unmotivated towards school, so I'm a lousy
source of advice. ;) But I'd say that it's better to take some time off of
school and search for your true motivation than to go into serious debt in
order to spend four years being miserable, earning lousy grades, and barely
graduating. You should certainly change _something_ , right now -- your major,
your school, your enrollment status, something -- rather than try to just
muddle through. College is too expensive to not take seriously.

Ultimately, though, I'd be wary of the folks who encourage you to skip college
altogether and forever. Anecdotes from successful people are great and all,
but by definition not everyone is above average, and the stats continue to
tell a different story: People with college degrees get jobs more easily and
earn more money. Of course, if you find yourself getting jobs and earning
money you can always put off school until the time when you're not...

~~~
bluejeansummer
I realize that this is an important decision, and as such, am not going to
make any irreversible choices until a month before school starts again in the
fall.

I'm currently studying Computer Science. I'm pretty sure that this is the
right field for me, because the few moments of true motivation tend to come at
the initial phases of personal projects, such as a GolfScript interpreter I'm
working on (<https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript>). Most
everything else (including my CS classes) feels like jumping through hoops,
chasing after a degree that I don't think will be worth much when accompanied
by bad grades.

A change is certainly in order, and I hope to find something that works over
the summer. If I do get a job, I may return to school when I have a reason
other than "It's what you do after high school". Otherwise, I hope to have
found something that gives me the motivation to get through school.

Thanks for your advice.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Okay, your plan sounds decent, and good luck to you.

But now that I've learned that you are studying CS (it's a good guess, around
here, but one hates to assume) I'll go out on a limb and offer some further
advice: Stop. Change majors. Find something that's actually interesting or
challenging for you.

Yes, you're obviously way into programming. That's great, every subject is now
all about programming. Any other major will absolutely love you. You may start
having to lie, telling them that you don't really know what Python is, just so
that you don't end up programming all day and all night.

You might even be into CS, in theory, if you found the right program and the
right teacher. But you need to remember two crucial facts:

A) Programming bears the same relationship to CS as the management of a
professional NASCAR pit crew does to solving the Navier-Stokes equations. It
usually doesn't hurt a programmer to have a solid grounding in CS, just as it
wouldn't hurt a NASCAR mechanic to have a solid grounding in fluid mechanics,
but it's unnecessary, and just because you love engines doesn't mean you'll
love Carnot engines.

You can program quite successfully with almost no formal CS training at all,
or so my customers and employers have assured me. Moreover, even the best CS
program will teach you very little of what you actually need to know day-to-
day when you're building software for customers. You will learn all that on
your own, or perhaps you will learn it in classes that have nothing to do with
CS. (Or, if your little summer project is any guide, you know a bunch of it
already and will soon learn the rest through experience.)

B) Even if CS really is right for you and vice versa, that doesn't mean your
_school's_ "CS" is. Too many CS classes and programs are apparently designed
to provide occupational certifications to future mid-level corporate Java
programmers. If majoring in CS seems significantly easier than majoring in
math, something is wrong. Go study something else. Math, for example.

I have a Ph.D. (Physics/EE) and I even did a postdoc once so I'm obviously
stupidly in love with school at some level. So maybe it's just me. But I can't
see any excuse for being bored in college. Colleges are full of interesting
things, many of which are so marginally profitable that you'll never find time
and money to do them anywhere else, even though they are _awesome_. Find them.
Major in music and jam with some great musicians. (Two of the best software
engineers I know started out as classical musicians.) Major in anthropological
linguistics and learn to do fieldwork with disappearing language families.
Study geology and do all your summer internships in a tent.

Major in ancient languages. (Another of my colleagues dropped out of physics,
studied old Norse, bootstrapped his own way into the MMORPG industry after
graduation and is now a programmer.) Study chemistry or (ahem) physics. Take
some statistics. Neglect not your molecular biology. My usual advice: Study a
laboratory science. You can spend the rest of your life sitting around typing
for the price of a laptop, a chair, and a coffeemaker, and you don't even need
a computer to enjoy a CS book, but after you leave school you will never again
see anything like a university science lab unless you have tens of thousands
of dollars, a big basement and one hell of a lot of spare time.

------
billswift
_This Way Out_ is the best book for college-level self-study I have used. The
book is in 3 parts, the last 2 Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study are too
dated to be useful since it was published in 1973. The part that is
particularly to the point here is that they also discuss the absolute
essential for self-education - you must love to read, if you don't, then stay
in college where they will force you to read.

[http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-
traditional/...](http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-
traditional/dp/0525218009/ref=cm_cr-mr-title)

Also, I would add, for technical fields you need to be interested enough in
math to study it on your own as well.

