4 ms·

Let's Not Completely Give Up on College

33 points by dlevine 15y ago

Locke1689 15y ago
College is useful for people who want to make the best of it. My freshman year here I got involved with a research group examining virtualization in high performance computing (supercomputing). By the end of my freshman year I had helped write a big patch for QEMU to virtualize Intel HW instructions and implemented the software compatibility layer for Intel in our own virtual machine monitor. In addition to the invaluable experience this gave me (especially in practical C) I also appeared as a coauthor on the VMM paper in a very prestigious systems conference (IPDPS). In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer. This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result. Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming languages. If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.
- nupark2 15y ago
  Your experience sounds great. I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I do believe we must abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence, and ultimately, their value. For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you have. I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally, I'm a fan of the second theory: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...
amirhhz 15y ago
I really sympathise with the point made about allowing yourself (at least) a year to "mature" and/or figure out, even to a small degree, what direction you want to take your life in before going to University. I think if I'd done that I would have been a lot less susceptible to upvoting all the recent "HE is a waste of time" articles. Philosophically (and practically), not so sure about trying to fix higher education through purely economic/business terms, but then I'm no expert on it.
bluejeansummer 15y ago
This is something I needed to hear. I'm considering dropping out of college after only finishing one year. I never felt any motivation towards school, as my grades reflect. I've been trying to decide whether dropping out and trying to find work with a small startup would give my life the meaning and motivation it sorely lacks. Does this community have any advice?
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  A) It is early June. Presumably you are not going back to school until September. Make the most of the next three months. Then decide in September. A rough rule of thumb: If you can't find paying work in software, or at least get yourself on a road that will obviously lead to paying work in software in short order (i.e. build and launch something!) in the next three months you'd probably be wise to go back to school. B) What are you studying? Might you rather be studying something else? Are you at the right school? There are other schools: Cheaper ones, larger ones, smaller ones, more serious ones, less serious ones. I have no experience with being unmotivated towards school, so I'm a lousy source of advice. ;) But I'd say that it's better to take some time off of school and search for your true motivation than to go into serious debt in order to spend four years being miserable, earning lousy grades, and barely graduating. You should certainly change something, right now -- your major, your school, your enrollment status, something -- rather than try to just muddle through. College is too expensive to not take seriously. Ultimately, though, I'd be wary of the folks who encourage you to skip college altogether and forever. Anecdotes from successful people are great and all, but by definition not everyone is above average, and the stats continue to tell a different story: People with college degrees get jobs more easily and earn more money. Of course, if you find yourself getting jobs and earning money you can always put off school until the time when you're not...
  - bluejeansummer 15y ago
    I realize that this is an important decision, and as such, am not going to make any irreversible choices until a month before school starts again in the fall. I'm currently studying Computer Science. I'm pretty sure that this is the right field for me, because the few moments of true motivation tend to come at the initial phases of personal projects, such as a GolfScript interpreter I'm working on (https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript). Most everything else (including my CS classes) feels like jumping through hoops, chasing after a degree that I don't think will be worth much when accompanied by bad grades. A change is certainly in order, and I hope to find something that works over the summer. If I do get a job, I may return to school when I have a reason other than "It's what you do after high school". Otherwise, I hope to have found something that gives me the motivation to get through school. Thanks for your advice.
billswift 15y ago
This Way Out is the best book for college-level self-study I have used. The book is in 3 parts, the last 2 Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study are too dated to be useful since it was published in 1973. The part that is particularly to the point here is that they also discuss the absolute essential for self-education - you must love to read, if you don't, then stay in college where they will force you to read. http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/dp/0525218009/ref=cm_cr-mr-title http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/... Also, I would add, for technical fields you need to be interested enough in math to study it on your own as well.

33 points by dlevine 15y ago

College is useful for people who want to make the best of it. My freshman year here I got involved with a research group examining virtualization in high performance computing (supercomputing). By the end of my freshman year I had helped write a big patch for QEMU to virtualize Intel HW instructions and implemented the software compatibility layer for Intel in our own virtual machine monitor. In addition to the invaluable experience this gave me (especially in practical C) I also appeared as a coauthor on the VMM paper in a very prestigious systems conference (IPDPS). In my sophomore year I was elected President of the Northwestern ACM chapter and tried to get more involved and invested in computer science at Northwestern. At the end of that year I also met Microsoft recruiters at a Northwestern job fair and went to work on SQL server over the summer. This past year I co-taught my first class in security and network penetration at Northwestern and my co-lecturer and I led our team to 8th/72 in the International Capture the Flag Contest (a worldwide university hacking competition). I also started working on the Racket programming language with Prof. Robby Findler. Later I met Google recruiters at a job fair this year and will be working in the Google Chicago office this summer as a result. Next year I hope to complete my masters and finish a thesis in programming languages. If someone doesn't think they want or need college that's perfectly fine with me but I wouldn't give up my college experiences for anything.

nupark2 15y ago
Your experience sounds great. I agree that we don't need to abandon college. However, I do believe we must abandon the idea that a college degree is a mechanism by which we can accurately determine an potential employee's baseline education, intelligence, and ultimately, their value. For all the value you've derived from school, there will be 100 more individuals in your graduating class that never achieve a 10th of what you have. I really enjoyed the recent New Yorker article on "Why we have college," where two different theories for the purpose of college are presented. Personally, I'm a fan of the second theory: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...

amirhhz 15y ago

I really sympathise with the point made about allowing yourself (at least) a year to "mature" and/or figure out, even to a small degree, what direction you want to take your life in before going to University. I think if I'd done that I would have been a lot less susceptible to upvoting all the recent "HE is a waste of time" articles. Philosophically (and practically), not so sure about trying to fix higher education through purely economic/business terms, but then I'm no expert on it.

bluejeansummer 15y ago

This is something I needed to hear. I'm considering dropping out of college after only finishing one year. I never felt any motivation towards school, as my grades reflect. I've been trying to decide whether dropping out and trying to find work with a small startup would give my life the meaning and motivation it sorely lacks. Does this community have any advice?

mechanical_fish 15y ago
A) It is early June. Presumably you are not going back to school until September. Make the most of the next three months. Then decide in September. A rough rule of thumb: If you can't find paying work in software, or at least get yourself on a road that will obviously lead to paying work in software in short order (i.e. build and launch something!) in the next three months you'd probably be wise to go back to school. B) What are you studying? Might you rather be studying something else? Are you at the right school? There are other schools: Cheaper ones, larger ones, smaller ones, more serious ones, less serious ones. I have no experience with being unmotivated towards school, so I'm a lousy source of advice. ;) But I'd say that it's better to take some time off of school and search for your true motivation than to go into serious debt in order to spend four years being miserable, earning lousy grades, and barely graduating. You should certainly change something, right now -- your major, your school, your enrollment status, something -- rather than try to just muddle through. College is too expensive to not take seriously. Ultimately, though, I'd be wary of the folks who encourage you to skip college altogether and forever. Anecdotes from successful people are great and all, but by definition not everyone is above average, and the stats continue to tell a different story: People with college degrees get jobs more easily and earn more money. Of course, if you find yourself getting jobs and earning money you can always put off school until the time when you're not...
- bluejeansummer 15y ago
  I realize that this is an important decision, and as such, am not going to make any irreversible choices until a month before school starts again in the fall. I'm currently studying Computer Science. I'm pretty sure that this is the right field for me, because the few moments of true motivation tend to come at the initial phases of personal projects, such as a GolfScript interpreter I'm working on (https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript https://bitbucket.org/bluejeansummer/golfscript). Most everything else (including my CS classes) feels like jumping through hoops, chasing after a degree that I don't think will be worth much when accompanied by bad grades. A change is certainly in order, and I hope to find something that works over the summer. If I do get a job, I may return to school when I have a reason other than "It's what you do after high school". Otherwise, I hope to have found something that gives me the motivation to get through school. Thanks for your advice.

billswift 15y ago

This Way Out is the best book for college-level self-study I have used. The book is in 3 parts, the last 2 Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study are too dated to be useful since it was published in 1973. The part that is particularly to the point here is that they also discuss the absolute essential for self-education - you must love to read, if you don't, then stay in college where they will force you to read. http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/dp/0525218009/ref=cm_cr-mr-title http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/... Also, I would add, for technical fields you need to be interested enough in math to study it on your own as well.