7 ms·

>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize h

by inapis 6y ago

>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now. Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.

sdan 6y ago
Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.
- juped 6y ago
  Be sure to get the 4.0 GPA too - it's very nice to have for surprisingly long. Absolutely don't "challenge yourself". You can do that when you're not being graded on it.
  - nostrebored 6y ago
    I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it's paid dividends for years. I still work on projects where my college exposure allows me to have a deeper understanding. Working with customers operating at scale, my (in retrospect, amazing) exposure to HPC and distributed computing has been so valuable. But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.
  - toomanybeersies 6y ago
    I haven't been asked what my GPA was since I got my first graduate job (which was a follow on from my internship), which is very convenient because I graduated with a shocking GPA.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Ditto. The only people who cared about it were the Grad School applications, and the occasional (and ever-rarer) entry-level job application. After 2 years in the field no one gives a damn. The degree is basically just a box for HR to check off.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    Assuming that's remotely feasible. My alma mater only had 7 students graduate with a 4.0 ... In 60 years of existence. I went to a top tier school and struggled with various parts of the curriculum (CHEM52, I'm looking at you). I convinced myself that I wasn't smart/good enough for various futures I'd previously envisioned, like academia or research. My confidence was shot and it affected where I applied for jobs out of college. I ended up taking a contract position at Microsoft. I thrived, got my confidence back, and got hired full-time. Two years after graduation an acquitance from my college reached out to me- he was coming to Microsoft Research for the summer, could I help him find a place to rent? We reconnected and got talking- It turned out his undergrad GPA was lower then mine! I never did find why he was more confident than me, but he had no problem thinking he was still qualified for a PhD program and was clearly doing well enough there to get picked up by prestigious research lab. I'm pretty happy with the way my life has turned out, I have no reason to go back and change any decisions. In fact, many of the most valuable experience I had were unrelated to the classroom- student government, interactions with the board of trustees, putting together funding for various small projects. And I've had a great career since college. The only thing I wish I could change was how I felt about myself- I wish I'd been able to tell 20-year old me "you are doing fine! It'll be awesome in the end!" and have 20-year me believe me. All of the above is a long way of saying- don't worry too much about your grades. Don't blow them off, but in the end they aren't as important as we often make them out to be.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      I wonder what those 4.0 former students are doing now.
      - topkai22 6y ago
        I think one of them ended up teaching at the college :)
  - screye 6y ago
    ehh, I don't know about that. I haven't heard of GPA being useful for anything in tech apart from doing a PhD, which require you to have both a high GPA and to challenge yourself.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  University has so much more value than the coursework and the name. The network you mention is a good starting point. You call it network and it evokes the idea of those connections that can help you later. But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned. Universities also do research you can be part of. I helped build a CubeSat during my uni time and was part of a sounding rocket mission. You can't do that in a YouTube video of a lecture and you can't to that as a side project. University is a place to meet like minded people and learn about stuff you are interested in. You get teachers and facilities you wouldn't normally have access to. Use it! And make sure that you go to uni with this mental model of it. Whenever you see uni doing things that don't fit in that model, try to change it. Unis aren't there to make sure you get a better job, get access to hidden networks in society, take loads of money from students, crank out degrees, ... They are there to enable people growing personally and fuel that growth back into growing humanities knowledge. ... and yeah, some local hackerspaces are closer to that idea of an University that many Universities are. That's a problem.
  - zenlot 6y ago
    > But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned. Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
    - cguess 6y ago
      None of which come close to replicating the random occasions of running into a fellow student in the cafeteria and them asking you for a quick question. Or discussing the ideas you're studying over beer at the campus bar for hours. Asynchronous, anonymous, learning has its place but it is absolutely no substitute for the environment a campus provides.
      - zenlot 6y ago
        It depends on a person.
empath75 6y ago
My dad was a grocery checker and my mom was a secretary. I didn’t go to college. I’m currently making more than six figures as a software engineer. The only meaningful networking connections I made outside of work was going to raves in the early 2000s.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  My six siblings and I had farmer parents with a high school education. We all went to (and finished) college. Now we have 2 fortune-500 VPs, a research nursing administrator, an IT professional, and 2 self-employed business owners doing very well. So it can help to go to college. Just saying. Oh. And the next generation - 100% college educated. Several PhD's. All well employed. None working on the farm. So for some segment of America at some time, college was/is a huge factor in their social mobility.
  - zenlot 6y ago
    > None working on the farm. You seem to be proud, but sound derogatory towards those who actually work on a farm and are proud of it.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Success in America isn't "becomes a farm laborer". I think that's well-understood. I actually live on my farm, have for 25 years. With Silicon Valley money from successful startup buyouts. Btw "You …" kind of posts are sort of unnecessary. I know what I am; no need to tell me. Maybe just add your own thoughts, its less argumentative and we learn something.
      - zenlot 6y ago
        I write how I write, either you like it or not. Keep your lectures on how to start sentences for your kids, I am not interested.
        6y ago
sokoloff 6y ago
How can college be necessary for 95% of the population when somewhere south of 50% attend now? I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Because their lives suck now, and college would have alleviated that. That they didn't (have the chance to ) go is part of the point I believe. But yeah it was worded strangely.
  - anonymoushn 6y ago
    If an additional 45% of the population go to college, will society create hundreds of millions of high-paying jobs for them?
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      For most of my career, nobody 'created' a job for me. I went out and figured out something useful to do, did it, and made a living. And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world? Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class? Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
      - logicchains 6y ago
        >And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays. > Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents. Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else. I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point. I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly. I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done. You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.

by inapis 6y ago

sdan 6y ago

Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.

juped 6y ago
Be sure to get the 4.0 GPA too - it's very nice to have for surprisingly long. Absolutely don't "challenge yourself". You can do that when you're not being graded on it.
- nostrebored 6y ago
  I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it's paid dividends for years. I still work on projects where my college exposure allows me to have a deeper understanding. Working with customers operating at scale, my (in retrospect, amazing) exposure to HPC and distributed computing has been so valuable. But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  I haven't been asked what my GPA was since I got my first graduate job (which was a follow on from my internship), which is very convenient because I graduated with a shocking GPA.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Ditto. The only people who cared about it were the Grad School applications, and the occasional (and ever-rarer) entry-level job application. After 2 years in the field no one gives a damn. The degree is basically just a box for HR to check off.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Assuming that's remotely feasible. My alma mater only had 7 students graduate with a 4.0 ... In 60 years of existence. I went to a top tier school and struggled with various parts of the curriculum (CHEM52, I'm looking at you). I convinced myself that I wasn't smart/good enough for various futures I'd previously envisioned, like academia or research. My confidence was shot and it affected where I applied for jobs out of college. I ended up taking a contract position at Microsoft. I thrived, got my confidence back, and got hired full-time. Two years after graduation an acquitance from my college reached out to me- he was coming to Microsoft Research for the summer, could I help him find a place to rent? We reconnected and got talking- It turned out his undergrad GPA was lower then mine! I never did find why he was more confident than me, but he had no problem thinking he was still qualified for a PhD program and was clearly doing well enough there to get picked up by prestigious research lab. I'm pretty happy with the way my life has turned out, I have no reason to go back and change any decisions. In fact, many of the most valuable experience I had were unrelated to the classroom- student government, interactions with the board of trustees, putting together funding for various small projects. And I've had a great career since college. The only thing I wish I could change was how I felt about myself- I wish I'd been able to tell 20-year old me "you are doing fine! It'll be awesome in the end!" and have 20-year me believe me. All of the above is a long way of saying- don't worry too much about your grades. Don't blow them off, but in the end they aren't as important as we often make them out to be.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    I wonder what those 4.0 former students are doing now.
    - topkai22 6y ago
      I think one of them ended up teaching at the college :)
- screye 6y ago
  ehh, I don't know about that. I haven't heard of GPA being useful for anything in tech apart from doing a PhD, which require you to have both a high GPA and to challenge yourself.
turbinerneiter 6y ago
University has so much more value than the coursework and the name. The network you mention is a good starting point. You call it network and it evokes the idea of those connections that can help you later. But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned. Universities also do research you can be part of. I helped build a CubeSat during my uni time and was part of a sounding rocket mission. You can't do that in a YouTube video of a lecture and you can't to that as a side project. University is a place to meet like minded people and learn about stuff you are interested in. You get teachers and facilities you wouldn't normally have access to. Use it! And make sure that you go to uni with this mental model of it. Whenever you see uni doing things that don't fit in that model, try to change it. Unis aren't there to make sure you get a better job, get access to hidden networks in society, take loads of money from students, crank out degrees, ... They are there to enable people growing personally and fuel that growth back into growing humanities knowledge. ... and yeah, some local hackerspaces are closer to that idea of an University that many Universities are. That's a problem.
- zenlot 6y ago
  > But they are also very beneficial during your studies. Learning alone means you never have the chance to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned. Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.
  - cguess 6y ago
    None of which come close to replicating the random occasions of running into a fellow student in the cafeteria and them asking you for a quick question. Or discussing the ideas you're studying over beer at the campus bar for hours. Asynchronous, anonymous, learning has its place but it is absolutely no substitute for the environment a campus provides.
    - zenlot 6y ago
      It depends on a person.

empath75 6y ago

My dad was a grocery checker and my mom was a secretary. I didn’t go to college. I’m currently making more than six figures as a software engineer. The only meaningful networking connections I made outside of work was going to raves in the early 2000s.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
My six siblings and I had farmer parents with a high school education. We all went to (and finished) college. Now we have 2 fortune-500 VPs, a research nursing administrator, an IT professional, and 2 self-employed business owners doing very well. So it can help to go to college. Just saying. Oh. And the next generation - 100% college educated. Several PhD's. All well employed. None working on the farm. So for some segment of America at some time, college was/is a huge factor in their social mobility.
- zenlot 6y ago
  > None working on the farm. You seem to be proud, but sound derogatory towards those who actually work on a farm and are proud of it.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Success in America isn't "becomes a farm laborer". I think that's well-understood. I actually live on my farm, have for 25 years. With Silicon Valley money from successful startup buyouts. Btw "You …" kind of posts are sort of unnecessary. I know what I am; no need to tell me. Maybe just add your own thoughts, its less argumentative and we learn something.
    - zenlot 6y ago
      I write how I write, either you like it or not. Keep your lectures on how to start sentences for your kids, I am not interested.
      - 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago

How can college be necessary for 95% of the population when somewhere south of 50% attend now? I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Because their lives suck now, and college would have alleviated that. That they didn't (have the chance to ) go is part of the point I believe. But yeah it was worded strangely.
- anonymoushn 6y ago
  If an additional 45% of the population go to college, will society create hundreds of millions of high-paying jobs for them?
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    For most of my career, nobody 'created' a job for me. I went out and figured out something useful to do, did it, and made a living. And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world? Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class? Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
    - logicchains 6y ago
      >And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Have you been involved much in hiring? I suspect if you had it would disabuse you of the notion that university is effective at producing "capable, educated, useful people".

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays. > Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents. Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else. I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point. I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly. I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done. You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.