

My College Experiment: Building a drone with financial aid money.  - mejakethomas
http://jacobjthomas.com/my_college_experiment/

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jwb119
Pro tip: find a professor at your school that will let you do this for
independent study credit.

You're likely to be able to get the funding through the school for your
materials for the drone, you'll still be getting credit towards graduation,
and you won't be doing anything that might be illegal with financial aid
money.

~~~
mejakethomas
Cool! Thank you. I'll look into that!

~~~
Jtsummers
Another thing to do is find out about clubs. Student organizations can often
get money from the school's student council. If there's already an R/C
aircraft club, you can join in with them, or start your own focused on the
other aspects of drone/UAV tech that they don't cover but try to recruit from
them.

Also, if you have an active IEEE or ACM branch at your school, they might have
additional funding if you can get enough people and a faculty member or two on
board. We provided funding to a couple projects, one was the SECON robotics
competition, but I vaguely recall helping with some other project(s).

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HarryHirsch
The guy cites this Forbes article as motivation: "Getting a better GPA ... is
the focus. It ...doesn’t lead to working effectively with others. ...
Traditional education is concerned with staying in context ... . Innovation is
... about crossing boundaries, and digging deeper into problems and their
solutions from a variety of angles." It continues in that vein for many
sentences more.

It's no news for anyone who has done any amount of research in science or
engineering that research is a team effort, that one has to work across
subject boundaries, and that it isn't at all risk-free. That's why nowadays
undergraduates are _expected_ to work in research labs from the sophomore year
onwards. It is impossible to get into any serious PhD program without research
experience.

I'm not sure why the blog author quotes a Forbes article full of non-truths,
but we wish that he gets his project off the ground, so that he can see what a
university is really like.

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argv_empty
_4\. “Learning is profoundly passive.”_

In my experience, people who believe this have not been good students.

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dougk16
If you're doing almost anything related to software, it's a no brainer. The
only real value to college in this case is meeting similar-minded people and
having a piece of paper that "proves" you know a bunch of stuff. If you do
well, it also proves you're a hard worker to some degree, so you're more
attractive to companies based on that alone.

Overall, for software, the classic college experience is becoming a racket
though, so I'm glad to see you're taking things into your own hands.

Other fields, I'm not too familiar with, but for example if you want to become
a surgeon, you pretty much need college because you can't go around practicing
on dead bodies on your own.

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MWil
Forgive my ignorance but isn't financial aid for a very specific thing...as in
not just choosing whatever the hell you want to do in your free time but
explicitly for the education for which the application was made? Is this
legal?

~~~
codebeard
It's not illegal, but I am of the opinion it is utterly wrong, but that's
another discussion for another day.

~~~
jetti
I have a feeling it could get some jail time. You are supposed to report
dropping of classes to the financial aid office so your aid can be modified.
Not doing this and also just keeping the money may be grounds to be hit with a
fraud charge. Never the less, it isn't something I would want to risk.

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notahacker
I can't help thinking the fact you're building a UAV is more unusual and
interesting than the fact you're choosing to learn about it online.

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gavinlynch
Enjoyed this post. And my initial reaction to the headline before reading the
article was: Duh, of course you can :) Autodidacts for life.

------
saraid216
> 2\. “Specialization is celebrated and rewarded.”

> Traditional education is concerned with staying in context and within the
> lines of subject content; Innovation is the exact opposite. It is all about
> crossing boundaries, and digging deeper into problems and their solutions
> from a variety of angles.

Eh. Here's what this misses:

You can't cross boundaries if you're not _inside_ those boundaries to begin
with. You can't usefully apply different perspectives if you don't have a
solid intellectual investment into those perspectives. That grounding gives
you the ability to generalize and abstract, and it's using those abstractions,
girded by referents, that make those perspectives useful.

You can trumpet innovation all you like, but what's really going on here is
that innovators tend to deeply understand multiple fields without being
snobbish about cross-pollinating. That's all. Trad.Ed. only really fails here
because it fails to encourage such behavior.

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tunesmith
Which coursera course(s)?

~~~
mejakethomas
Control of Mobile Robots - <https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob>

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kamakazizuru
as opposed to letting someone who actually needs the financial aid money get
access to it ? :/

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OGinparadise
_My College Experiment: Building a drone with financial aid money_

You should have talked to someone before saying this. IIRC, financial aid is
to be used in very specific ways.

~~~
danilocampos
> financial aid is to be used in very specific ways.

From tales I've heard, those specific ways seem to be chiefly pizza and
intoxicants.

So this seems quite the improvement. Besides, success often requires
identifying the bendy rules and flexing them out of your way for a moment.
Good experience.

~~~
OGinparadise
Or going to Cancun "to learn Spanish" instead of taking a Spanish class ;).

The idea is not to rub it in; someone might just decide to take a look, and
the student can get royally screwed.

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tkahn6
Is there a reason you chose to drop a class and not just do it in your free
time and take a hit on your GPA for the semester?

~~~
mejakethomas
Yeah there actually is- Financial aid $$ for the drone stuff :) I figure if
I'm going to get it, I might as well put it to good use.

~~~
tkahn6
Oh wow that's cool.

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abraininavat
The income you don't use toward tuition, fees, books, etc, is taxable income,
so make sure you report it to the IRS.

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't know how financial aid for college works in the US but in the UK it is
mainly to be used for living expenses. And in this context "living expenses"
seems to include things like beer and xbox games.

~~~
abraininavat
What people use it for and what you can legally use it for without being taxed
aren't necessarily the same thing.

Regarding the US, please see: <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p970.pdf>

I quote: "Expenses that do not qualify. Qualified education expenses do not
include the cost of: • Room and board, • Travel, • Research, • Clerical help,
or • Equipment and other expenses that are not required for enrollment in or
attendance at an eligible educational institution"

Any expenses used toward a drone are clearly taxable even if you call it
"Research". In practice, the IRS would never find out (unless you were
audited). Unless, that is, you went and posted your idea on your blog and then
posted that on HN.

