It’s hard to say whether the lack of purpose causes the addiction to social media or vice versa. I think it’s probably the reverse. It’s hard to find purpose in life when every time you’ve been bored since the age of 12 you’ve logged into a distraction machine.
What I find most troubling is that a lot of people in my age group know the detrimental effect social media has on them. They’ll knowingly waste a couple of hours everyday. And, anybody who tries to pull away from it is ridiculed for “trying to appear superior” or mocked for apparently subscribing to “back to nature” ideology. This makes it even harder to leave; it delayed my own escape by at least 1 year.
What makes it downright frightening to me is that we as a collective have several enormously difficult problems that we must solve. Information floods the brain and drowns out thoughts that should be had daily like “the past 5 years have been the hottest ever recorded.” Politics is another area that scares me. People my age are upset with the government. Yet, most could not write more than 5 tweets about why. They’ll claim the opposition has been lead astray by questionable news sources on social media sites while simultaneously participating in exactly that trap themselves.
Quick and cheap ideas became a source of easy gratification. Generations raised in such an environment are probably not prepared to face the challenge of a world sliding - admittedly slowly - towards disaster.
Everybody keeps saying that it is a no brainer to take a gap year. I am headed into my senior year and I don't think it is as clear cut as everybody here makes it out to be. What are my options when I take a gap year? I can either live in my apartment near my school and do nothing or live at home. Either way, I am doing nothing because I have no money.
I haven't gone to classes consistently since the end of my sophomore year. As this year has unfolded, I've discovered that I can learn material much faster out of a textbook. I miss lectures because it was nice having a professor physically near me for questions and advice. That said, I am managing fine. Testing has been completely changed at my University and the anxiety I had around it is gone. I have 24 hours + open book for my exams now. I actually fill in many of the gaps in my course knowledge during the midterms and finals, leading to a more complete understanding of the class. This is obviously not true for everybody, but I am learning more and faster than I was before, leaving free time to explore adjacent interests and read.
The biggest problem I am facing with my learning at the moment is administrative nonsense. Enrolling for classes was already bad (UC). Now, not only is it bad, but it is pointlessly bad. I am not allowed to enroll in a class because there are 35 students in it. Based on what I've seen, maybe 20 will watch the live zoom lectures. Why is an online class that hardly anybody shows up to being capped? I believe it is because there is some contractual limit on how many students a prof/ta can be "responsible for". My roommate got that explanation after he was told he couldn't enroll in the last class he needed to graduate last quarter. In my mind, that reasoning does not hold at all given the current situation. It is either shocking that the administrators don't realize this or it is disgusting that they do realize it and choose not to change it.
That said, I am paying nearly $70,000 this year. Same as I paid last year. I am being ripped off this year. I was ripped off last year. Last year was terrible and this year is extremely terrible. At this point, I want to put the whole thing behind me. College has been great because all I've had to do is learn and I've made amazing friends. This year we'll be in our apartment carrying on.
The biggest concern that I have is the job market I'll graduate into.
> What are my options when I take a gap year? I can either live in my apartment near my school and do nothing or live at home. Either way, I am doing nothing because I have no money.
You could work. The delivery companies are all desperate to hire people. It's not glamorous or high-paying work, but it's better than paying through the nose for online classes.
> That said, I am paying nearly $70,000 this year. Same as I paid last year. I am being ripped off this year. I was ripped off last year. Last year was terrible and this year is extremely terrible. At this point, I want to put the whole thing behind me. College has been great because all I've had to do is learn and I've made amazing friends. This year we'll be in our apartment carrying on.
With due respect, there's no college in existence I would pay $70,000/year for. In four years that's $280,000. That's a nice single family home in a nice suburb, or a brownstone in an up-and-coming city neighborhood. Even if the job market magically rights itself, what job are you expecting to get that will allow you to pay that off?
One thing you could do during a gap year that would be worthwhile would be to apply for every scholarship you can to bring that cost down.
I am a professor. The limit on the enrollment for my class in the fall, which will be online, is principally dictated by TA resources.
The TAs hold discussion sections (also online), hold office hours and grade exams. I don't think it is unreasonable to limit the number of students per TA.
There are similar restrictions on my time (I can only have so many students before it becomes impossible to answer questions in lecture or office hours). But I think these considerations are less restrictive.
Moreover, even if one doesn't care about how much work the TAs and I might have to do, it is very difficult bureaucratically to increase the number of students per TA. There are department policies limiting this number, university-wide policies, and union contracts.
Oh, and there are looming budget cuts, which will probably reduce the number of TAs available and lower maximum enrollments.
Beware of the job market. If you can't find a job when you graduate next year, you get to go into the horrible "haven't had a job since I graduated X months ago" which can turn your resume into poison for quite a few industries.
I saw a lot of people have this issue after the 2008 collapse.
Technologies:
Python (Tensorflow, Numpy, Matplotlib), C++, tiny bit of Neo4J
Resume:
please email for the full thing, but I’ll explain a bit of my experience below.
Email: dleviminzi@gmail.com
I am a student looking for experience. Getting paid would be awesome for me, but more than anything I need to learn. I go to UCLA and study mathematics of computation. I’ve taken all of the normal cs course load. Some of my favorite classes have been Networks(math), and Computational Medical Imaging(CS). For the former I worked on a project analyzing brain atlases (maps) of psychiatric cs healthy patients. For the latter, I examined a variety of super resolution techniques (EDSR, WDSR, RAISR). I compared performance and compute. In the end I wrote a paper that proposed a hybrid of those models that would be most realistic for a hospital setting.
I decided on this major late, so last summer I took courses to catch up. Of course I had expected that would be an okay decision because I could get experience this summer. I was meant to be doing data analysis of small businesses in different neighborhoods for a laboratory on campus. Unfortunately, the data cannot be shared remotely per contract and so I lost that opportunity. I really would like to get some experience and not just for the resume. I’ve loved coding in school and I want to make sure that I love coding in a real setting before I enter the workforce. If there is even the tiniest part of your work that you wish you could offload to some grunt, I’ll do it happily.
On an unrelated note, if anybody has any advice for me given what they’ve read, I’d really appreciate it.
Probably not UCLA, which does not even have enough space for people as things were. Even more so considering that nobody will want to live in a tiny 3 person box after all of this.
What would the difference be for an applicant who took a year in the middle? Would you still consider them in the degree bunch? Also, if schools are all online next year, do you expect the quality of college applicants to go down?
I wouldn’t care at all if they took a year off. Not one bit. I don’t particularly care about gaps in employment either. I only use college degree as a filter, because if I don’t I end up with a landslide of unqualified applicants to sort through. I haven’t found that with gap periods so far.
I don’t actually expect quality to go down from online offerings. I’ll be keeping an eye on it though, for sure.
I’m young and thus likely naive. But, is it not possible for a company like Mozilla to make a small tracking app that users opt in for. Then, they get rid of this when it is all over. I say Mozilla because, from what I understand, it is very privacy orientated, but any trustable company would do (ie not google, amazon, or Facebook).
I don't know what to do. I am in LA for school, but my family is in NYC. They want me to come back, but it seems like the last place I should be going right now. Being with family is important, but the idea of traveling and adding another person to the population of NYC seems counterproductive to fighting the virus.
I’m in the exact same boat. I want to fly home and this is the only time I’ll probably ever see super cheap tickets, but I’m young and the possibility that I could expose and infect so many people along the way makes it look as though shelter in place is the most responsible thing to do.
Don't worry about it; if you want to go home now, you should go home. If you're not symptomatic, and if you take even minimal precautions, you're highly unlikely to spread anything.
To me, the far more important consideration is if there's benefit in you and your family/friends being together now. That's what would make my decision.
What I find most troubling is that a lot of people in my age group know the detrimental effect social media has on them. They’ll knowingly waste a couple of hours everyday. And, anybody who tries to pull away from it is ridiculed for “trying to appear superior” or mocked for apparently subscribing to “back to nature” ideology. This makes it even harder to leave; it delayed my own escape by at least 1 year.
What makes it downright frightening to me is that we as a collective have several enormously difficult problems that we must solve. Information floods the brain and drowns out thoughts that should be had daily like “the past 5 years have been the hottest ever recorded.” Politics is another area that scares me. People my age are upset with the government. Yet, most could not write more than 5 tweets about why. They’ll claim the opposition has been lead astray by questionable news sources on social media sites while simultaneously participating in exactly that trap themselves.
Quick and cheap ideas became a source of easy gratification. Generations raised in such an environment are probably not prepared to face the challenge of a world sliding - admittedly slowly - towards disaster.