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Ask HN: Should I Go To College?

• philiphodgen 15y ago
  1. The "lazy" will kill you, no matter what you do in the future. Root this out of your character or face a lifetime of disappointment. Take this as advice from your 55-year old self. Build "relentless" and "focus" into your character. 2. College (for me) is where "lazy" was nuked from my character. Claremont McKenna College, FWIW. They laid on the "write a term paper a week in each class" thing and I rose to the challenge. No laziness and prodigious writing ability = the most valuable thing I can point to from college. (The only valuable thing I can point to from high school was learning to type extremely well). 3. "Java" is the wrong target. "Programming" is the wrong target. Think how much computing has changed in 5 years. Imagine 10 years ahead. The stuff you see now is just the entry point into a bigger game. 4. Total World Domination is the right target. Starting with -- yourself. Get rid of that laziness. Half-measures avail us nothing. 5. Getting "A" grades is a bag of shit as an objective. I've hired and fired plenty of employees with high grades and advanced degrees because they couldn't get stuff done. Knowing _why_ (for anything you are doing) is the game in school. Not just knowing _how_ and reflexively giving answers to get a pat on the head and an "A". 6. College may or may not help you. Read www.calnewport.com for what in my opinion is the better approach to school. 7. (I would also tell myself as a junior in high school that maybe certain things shouldn't be ingested but that's another story entirely and probably doesn't apply to you).
• derekja 15y ago
  if you're too lazy to get good grades you should probably fix that before investing time/money in college. A couple years of working so that you have a clearer idea of WHY you're in college might help.
  • philiphodgen 15y ago
    Yes. Exactly. I took a year off between high school and college. Went to New Zealand. Worked at a ski resort. One day, while wielding a pick in the snow to break through frozen ground, I had the obvious epiphany.
• byoung2 15y ago
  For me, college was worth it for the experience more than the degree or education. I went to UCLA and got a degree in English. So far all the jobs I've gotten have been because of things I learned outside of classrooms. I am currently making six figures as a self-taught software engineer, but I don't think I would have gotten to this point had I not gone to college. It's not so much what I learned in lectures halls, but the people I met, and maturity I gained while I was there. It didn't hurt that I was there from 1998-2003 and got to see the first internet bubble from the inside (the scour.net guys lived about 10 doors down from me when Michael Ovitz invested in them).