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Honestly no offence meant, but you won't be very good in your connections. You won't know the right people, the alumni or professors or generally all the actua
by mattmanser 10y ago
Honestly no offence meant, but you won't be very good in your connections.
You won't know the right people, the alumni or professors or generally all the actually important people that will give you massive leg ups if you want to start a company.
As for learning? Your peers won't challenge you, you'll be exposed to easier lessons, to easier concepts, you won't really get challenged at all. When I was keeping up with this stuff, in the UK the shit unis taught Java, the good ones Lisp or Python. The whole ethos is different. A friend of mine got a 1st (best degree in UK) from the 2nd tier University he went to.
But he couldn't remotely handle complicated code written by our literally genius colleague (I've honestly never met someone so insanely good again in 15 years). He was not anywhere near 1st material in a real top-tier university. He would have been lucky to get a 2:2.
I know someone who did the 2nd tier route and who is genuinely good. He, perhaps like you, is the exception, not the rule.
- djtriptych 10y agoGenius coders make complicated concepts easier to wrangle, almost by definition. Don't know anything about your friend's skill level, but I did want to challenge that perception.
- jasoncchild 10y agoIt seems like the "connections" aspect is spot on, especially if you are considering founding a startup (and also seeking funding). That said I've certainly met and worked with engineers with degrees from prestigious institutions that were lacking in their skill set, particularly when it came to "real" field work.
- DGAP 10y agoAnd to get into the right colleges you need to go to the right high schools, and to pay for the right high schools, you need the right parents. It's almost as if the west coast isn't as meritocratic as it likes to think, and is really just a mirror image of Wall Street...
- nikdaheratik 10y agoYou can meet those people if you move out to the coasts after college. It's a long freakin' way from Kansas to California and if your goal is to have as little tuition and/or debt as possible to begin with, you're pretty much forced to go into whatever state you grew up in the U.S. I'm from the same state, and I chose the four year traditional route and it worked for me since I had lots of scholarships. If I didn't have as many, I may have started at the Community College instead. Additionally, your point about 1st tier versus 2nd tier is kind of off when most of the time people go to community college to get their general ed. requirements out of the way and then transfer to the larger Uni for the specialized classes. If you're majoring in C.S. and you want to take Physics I,II, Intro level English, and programming I/II that's going to be nearly the same no matter which Uni you're at.
- xj9 10y agoComplicated code? That doesn't sound like genius to me.
- witty_username 10y agoI think a genius coders makes a complex problem into simple code.