I went to Baruch College and graduated during the pandemic. I always describe it as a factory for turning poor immigrants into middle class accountants and actu

I went to Baruch College and graduated during the pandemic. I always describe it as a factory for turning poor immigrants into middle class accountants and actuaries. There is very little community there, as most students are commuters from the bronx, brooklyn, etc. -- my commute was 3 hours a day, many of my peers were similar. It also doesn't have a computer science department. I was close with one of the professors who ran the MFE program the article is about, Rados Radoicic. He is a great guy and cares a lot for his students and research. It is a depressing experience though if you have ambitions beyond going from family poverty to $50k/year (a big jump for most there and many of my friends from school). It was demoralizing for me. Baruch can't compete on prestige so I tried hard to compete on merit -- I put thousands of hours into building, made a popular open source project that ended up doing well on github & blowing up on HN, etc. Meanwhile I know students at MIT, Stanford, Harvard getting access to capital and resources to pursue the ideas that excited them, talking casually about how easy it was to raise, without much beyond the idea and their status. It's quite demoralizing, not just for me but for everyone else I knew at Baruch who wants to build too. The MFE program is special because they literally fly to China to recruit from its most prestigious institutions, and the bang for their buck is much bigger.