"""Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours.""" You can do that on the i

"""Ask questions of your professors. Have deep conversations with your fellow students and with your lecturers during office hours.""" You can do that on the internet, on sites like this and a million others, and probably in a better way - you have hundreds of people poring over and finding obvious flaws in your thinking rather than the handful you can have in a physical space. """Participate in real research, guided and mentored by real-life scientists. Do lab-based classes.""" That can easily be done outside of a university, at an industrial or government lab, the entire "non-research" infrastructure built around university labs is unnecessary for that.