7 ms·

Stanford is a platform

53 points by rnjailamba 3y ago

screye 3y ago
If you're wealthy enough to self-actualize, then self-actualize. With a qualification in place, it's good advice.
Upvoter33 3y ago
So young and yet already so full of advice …
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Well, it is advice for undergraduate students.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eitally 3y ago
  But the echo chamber is strong, there are hundreds (thousands?) of wealthy and well-connected teenagers graduating from the Andovers of the world who want to hear from their lauded peers. As for me, my kids are at our neighborhood public school where my son's best friend has a single parent who drives full-time for Uber and had to borrow running shoes from the coach for cross-country. It's important to pick the life lessons you want your kids to experience before they leave your house, and in my book the "gold star" my son earned by recognizing his friend was hungry and offering to share a Subway footlong with him is worth far more in life than trying to decide which clubs to join at a top 10 university.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Sounds like the school I teach at. Also sounds like you’re doing something right with your son. Tip o’ the cap.
- varrock 3y ago
  The advice in this blog post is specific to college, and the author of this post is in their last year; they certainly have the qualifications to give advice catered to incoming college students. For what it's worth, I've been out of college for a bit, and I've had very similar sentiments towards college as the author, but they came to me much later than they did for the author. I might also resonate more with the article because I was one of those people who fell into the trap of following my peers instead of prioritizing what I was actually interested in.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >So young and yet already so full of advice … Sounds like a Stanford kid.
thelastparadise 3y ago
> Many of the incoming students I speak with are overachievers who spent a lot of time in high school thinking about how to get into a great college. They strategized their extracurriculars and optimized their grades. (To an extent, that was me.) It really is a different world for the well-connected.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alephnerd 3y ago
  I went to a Stanford comparable school for my undergrad. I was not connected, being the child of first generation immigrant parents who never heard of schools like "Princeton" or "Duke" until I was in 10th grade. I had to make my own path and optimize for admissions, as a top tier program helped open doors that my parents could only dream of. This story is common for most kids at these programs.
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    [dead]
  - p00dles 3y ago
    By "this story", are you referring to your story, or the story described in the parent post "> Many of the incoming students I speak with are overachievers who spent a lot of time in high school thinking about how to get into a great college. They strategized their extracurriculars and optimized their grades. (To an extent, that was me.)"?
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Referring to thelastparadise saying "It really is a different world for the well-connected." It is, but plenty of us at these programs went to average High Schools but had great grades, extracurriculars, and an actual goal we wanted to achieve.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
smallerdemon 3y ago
Let's see... what does Stanford reward? checks notes Oh. Oh my. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-university-president-resigns https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-universit... Well, I'm sure that resignation came about after a thorough finding of misconduct. checks notes Oh. Exonerated?! https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-to-step-down-despite-probe-exonerating-him-of-research-misconduct https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-t... Well, I'm sure that these were probably shocking, recent revelations that brought this about? checks notes again Years, you say? https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/stanford-president-after-resignation-continues-withdrawing-scientific-papers-tainted-by-research-misconduct/ https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/sta... Oh Stanford. You scamp.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  There are many other sad stories like this. And this poor kid has started working for the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the biggest censors of the Internet. It's sad that this is going on at an institution of higher learning.
seydor 3y ago
[flagged]
ford 3y ago
The advice mostly still applies if you replace "Stanford" with "Higher Education Program" For most 18 year olds, doing well in school has been _the_ thing to focus on, for their entire life. Using school as a means to achieve something _else_ is a pretty big change in how they think about the world. And using it well requires both knowing what the "something else" is and how to use your higher education program to achieve it. This shift comes at the same time as a huge amount of independence & life changes (from parents/home town), and most people I know (me included) didn't really understand the purpose of higher education until they were a senior, or later Or even if they do, it's hard at 18 to know what the "something else" is
- c0balt 3y ago
  To give some context here it should also be said that many 18 year olds don't even remotely have a fixed vision of what that "something else" will be. In Germany there are multiple programms in schools for students around the time the decision for university/ learning a trade/ ... etc. comes to explicitly prepare people to find that "something" for themselves.
almost_usual 3y ago
Working rigorously and wasting your childhood years to flounder and pick CS at Stanford is absurd to me. Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in without having to go to an elite university or enter higher education at all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  I generally agree, but having a degree from a top 20 school would definitely make even a software development career easier, just because some companies filter candidates based on that, and some filter even more aggressively. And if you want to start a startup, being friends with connected folks from Stanford would help... assuming connecting with them is possible if they're wealthy and you're not -- assuming you can bridge the cultural gap. A lot of success really is who you know, so going somewhere where you meet a lot of people who are going somewhere can be very useful. But of course, they also need to be people who are open to networking, understand the value of networks, etc., which I suspect is somewhat more true of people who attend Stanford than those who go to UCs just because of the mindset of the folks going in.
- screye 3y ago
  A CS degree from Stanford is how you get a red carpet entry to a $500k+ entry-level AI/VC/Trading role. An astounding amount of tribal knowledge is hidden behind elite-CS-spaces. Some high-school hackers are the right combination of lucky, talented-and savvy enough to enter these spaces. But, walking that path without the fallback of an elite university puts you 1 mis-step away from eternal mediocrity.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    Having known a number of people taking that route, I don't believe it guarantees success any more than following a less defined path. If ones definition of success is limited to money, then maybe. I don't believe one can be successful and miserable. Accepting misery is accepting failure. You can have money and be miserable. It is actually quite common.
hownottowrite 3y ago
Looks like someone read Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Stanford rewards directionality and momentum What's the difference between "directionality" and "direction"?
- bibanez 3y ago
  I have read "directionality" being translated as trend in Spanish. I think it is a misnomer because it doesn't appear on the Cambridge dictionary. The correct word should be direction!
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  A PhD in educational leadership
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Directionality is a tendency to move in direction (presumably rather than meander). Direction is ... a direction. A person may "have a direction" but lack directionality, and thus fail to move in that direction. Somebody else may lack a direction, but should one become established, their directionality may ensure that they move along it. But ... it's all gobbledygook speech and mostly meaningless. A person does not have momentum either, other than as a metaphor or in the uninteresting case of simply being physically in motion, which I doubt Stanford cares about.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    If you're carrying some momentum, that will carry you over bumps and obstacles. (Edit: and potentially spin out of control and hit a wall...)
- HPsquared 3y ago
  And doesn't momentum, being a vector quantity, already have a direction?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Yes, but I read directionality to include the thoughtful/intentional choice of a given direction, making the pairing of "you should be thoughtful about your choice of direction" (directionality) and "you should also commit energy to ensure you actually make progress in that direction" (momentum).
gorjusborg 3y ago
Suggesting that students can't milk their prestigious degree is just false. It is a fact that you can, and it is stated as supporting the author's argument. Being a student at Stanford (or anywhere else) doesn't obligate one to 'great pursuits'. This is just evangelical nonsense trying to keep the prestige of the school high. It also sets up a false narrative that an individual's choices are the main factor of one's success. I think there is value in looking at recognizing that school isn't an end in itself, but this sort of preachy message is too much. Here's some better advice: Do what you want, ignore people telling you the 'right way'.
- throwaway4220 3y ago
  Context: I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and I was rejected by Stanford undergrad. i think this is not true. Stanford or any Ivy League essentially guarantees you get a good 9-5 job
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    And perhaps a wasted life too. Stanford does much more training than educating—much of “education” at all levels is just mind-numbing training. When we focus on the metrics of successful employment we risk losing track of what matters more.
    - gorjusborg 3y ago
      > And perhaps a wasted life too. I don't disagree with you completely, but I do disagree slightly. The biggest part of what bugs me about the article is the assumption it makes implicitly that there is some external arbiter of what is good and bad. The only person whose opinion of whether a life is wasted that actually matters is the person living it. We can hold opinions on whether another person's life is wasted, but it doesn't matter. We don't get to decide that. If they find joy in something I would hate, they should do it. My opinion doesn't matter. That's the basis of why I think the article misses the mark. There is no right way or wrong way to 'use your education'. Each person gets to decide how to do their thing, and to decide whether they are succeeding or not. Success to me might look like failure to you (we may be measuring different things with different value systems).
skeptrune 3y ago
Holy hell education is meaningless
CalChris 3y ago
Typically, Berkeley was more brutal. The EECS Undergraduate Handbook (graduation contract) used to say that the prestige of the Berkeley degree increases with distance from the Campanile.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  * is Berkeley is still hell and I'd hire a Cal grad in a heartbeat, but that is also why Cal is an elite program
citrusx 3y ago
Feels like there's so much massive societal damage coming out of Stanford (Theranos, FTX, so much more...), that it's kind of a dying platform. If I'm a high-achieving high-schooler, I'm going to have real second thoughts about applying here.
Tabishbhai110 3y ago
[flagged]
Tabishbhai110 3y ago
[flagged]
Tabishbhai110 3y ago
[flagged]

53 points by rnjailamba 3y ago

screye 3y ago

If you're wealthy enough to self-actualize, then self-actualize. With a qualification in place, it's good advice.

Upvoter33 3y ago

So young and yet already so full of advice …

saagarjha 3y ago
Well, it is advice for undergraduate students.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eitally 3y ago
But the echo chamber is strong, there are hundreds (thousands?) of wealthy and well-connected teenagers graduating from the Andovers of the world who want to hear from their lauded peers. As for me, my kids are at our neighborhood public school where my son's best friend has a single parent who drives full-time for Uber and had to borrow running shoes from the coach for cross-country. It's important to pick the life lessons you want your kids to experience before they leave your house, and in my book the "gold star" my son earned by recognizing his friend was hungry and offering to share a Subway footlong with him is worth far more in life than trying to decide which clubs to join at a top 10 university.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Sounds like the school I teach at. Also sounds like you’re doing something right with your son. Tip o’ the cap.
varrock 3y ago
The advice in this blog post is specific to college, and the author of this post is in their last year; they certainly have the qualifications to give advice catered to incoming college students. For what it's worth, I've been out of college for a bit, and I've had very similar sentiments towards college as the author, but they came to me much later than they did for the author. I might also resonate more with the article because I was one of those people who fell into the trap of following my peers instead of prioritizing what I was actually interested in.
ramesh31 3y ago
>So young and yet already so full of advice … Sounds like a Stanford kid.

thelastparadise 3y ago

> Many of the incoming students I speak with are overachievers who spent a lot of time in high school thinking about how to get into a great college. They strategized their extracurriculars and optimized their grades. (To an extent, that was me.) It really is a different world for the well-connected.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alephnerd 3y ago
I went to a Stanford comparable school for my undergrad. I was not connected, being the child of first generation immigrant parents who never heard of schools like "Princeton" or "Duke" until I was in 10th grade. I had to make my own path and optimize for admissions, as a top tier program helped open doors that my parents could only dream of. This story is common for most kids at these programs.
- bannedbybros 3y ago
  [dead]
- p00dles 3y ago
  By "this story", are you referring to your story, or the story described in the parent post "> Many of the incoming students I speak with are overachievers who spent a lot of time in high school thinking about how to get into a great college. They strategized their extracurriculars and optimized their grades. (To an extent, that was me.)"?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Referring to thelastparadise saying "It really is a different world for the well-connected." It is, but plenty of us at these programs went to average High Schools but had great grades, extracurriculars, and an actual goal we wanted to achieve.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago

smallerdemon 3y ago

Let's see... what does Stanford reward? checks notes Oh. Oh my. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-university-president-resigns https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-universit... Well, I'm sure that resignation came about after a thorough finding of misconduct. checks notes Oh. Exonerated?! https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-to-step-down-despite-probe-exonerating-him-of-research-misconduct https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-t... Well, I'm sure that these were probably shocking, recent revelations that brought this about? checks notes again Years, you say? https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/stanford-president-after-resignation-continues-withdrawing-scientific-papers-tainted-by-research-misconduct/ https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/sta... Oh Stanford. You scamp.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xhkkffbf 3y ago
There are many other sad stories like this. And this poor kid has started working for the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the biggest censors of the Internet. It's sad that this is going on at an institution of higher learning.

seydor 3y ago

[flagged]

ford 3y ago

The advice mostly still applies if you replace "Stanford" with "Higher Education Program" For most 18 year olds, doing well in school has been _the_ thing to focus on, for their entire life. Using school as a means to achieve something _else_ is a pretty big change in how they think about the world. And using it well requires both knowing what the "something else" is and how to use your higher education program to achieve it. This shift comes at the same time as a huge amount of independence & life changes (from parents/home town), and most people I know (me included) didn't really understand the purpose of higher education until they were a senior, or later Or even if they do, it's hard at 18 to know what the "something else" is

c0balt 3y ago
To give some context here it should also be said that many 18 year olds don't even remotely have a fixed vision of what that "something else" will be. In Germany there are multiple programms in schools for students around the time the decision for university/ learning a trade/ ... etc. comes to explicitly prepare people to find that "something" for themselves.

almost_usual 3y ago

Working rigorously and wasting your childhood years to flounder and pick CS at Stanford is absurd to me. Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in without having to go to an elite university or enter higher education at all.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
epicureanideal 3y ago
I generally agree, but having a degree from a top 20 school would definitely make even a software development career easier, just because some companies filter candidates based on that, and some filter even more aggressively. And if you want to start a startup, being friends with connected folks from Stanford would help... assuming connecting with them is possible if they're wealthy and you're not -- assuming you can bridge the cultural gap. A lot of success really is who you know, so going somewhere where you meet a lot of people who are going somewhere can be very useful. But of course, they also need to be people who are open to networking, understand the value of networks, etc., which I suspect is somewhat more true of people who attend Stanford than those who go to UCs just because of the mindset of the folks going in.
screye 3y ago
A CS degree from Stanford is how you get a red carpet entry to a $500k+ entry-level AI/VC/Trading role. An astounding amount of tribal knowledge is hidden behind elite-CS-spaces. Some high-school hackers are the right combination of lucky, talented-and savvy enough to enter these spaces. But, walking that path without the fallback of an elite university puts you 1 mis-step away from eternal mediocrity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  Having known a number of people taking that route, I don't believe it guarantees success any more than following a less defined path. If ones definition of success is limited to money, then maybe. I don't believe one can be successful and miserable. Accepting misery is accepting failure. You can have money and be miserable. It is actually quite common.

hownottowrite 3y ago

Looks like someone read Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Stanford rewards directionality and momentum What's the difference between "directionality" and "direction"?

bibanez 3y ago
I have read "directionality" being translated as trend in Spanish. I think it is a misnomer because it doesn't appear on the Cambridge dictionary. The correct word should be direction!
mnky9800n 3y ago
A PhD in educational leadership
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Directionality is a tendency to move in direction (presumably rather than meander). Direction is ... a direction. A person may "have a direction" but lack directionality, and thus fail to move in that direction. Somebody else may lack a direction, but should one become established, their directionality may ensure that they move along it. But ... it's all gobbledygook speech and mostly meaningless. A person does not have momentum either, other than as a metaphor or in the uninteresting case of simply being physically in motion, which I doubt Stanford cares about.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  If you're carrying some momentum, that will carry you over bumps and obstacles. (Edit: and potentially spin out of control and hit a wall...)
HPsquared 3y ago
And doesn't momentum, being a vector quantity, already have a direction?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Yes, but I read directionality to include the thoughtful/intentional choice of a given direction, making the pairing of "you should be thoughtful about your choice of direction" (directionality) and "you should also commit energy to ensure you actually make progress in that direction" (momentum).

gorjusborg 3y ago

Suggesting that students can't milk their prestigious degree is just false. It is a fact that you can, and it is stated as supporting the author's argument. Being a student at Stanford (or anywhere else) doesn't obligate one to 'great pursuits'. This is just evangelical nonsense trying to keep the prestige of the school high. It also sets up a false narrative that an individual's choices are the main factor of one's success. I think there is value in looking at recognizing that school isn't an end in itself, but this sort of preachy message is too much. Here's some better advice: Do what you want, ignore people telling you the 'right way'.

throwaway4220 3y ago
Context: I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and I was rejected by Stanford undergrad. i think this is not true. Stanford or any Ivy League essentially guarantees you get a good 9-5 job
- robwwilliams 3y ago
  And perhaps a wasted life too. Stanford does much more training than educating—much of “education” at all levels is just mind-numbing training. When we focus on the metrics of successful employment we risk losing track of what matters more.
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    > And perhaps a wasted life too. I don't disagree with you completely, but I do disagree slightly. The biggest part of what bugs me about the article is the assumption it makes implicitly that there is some external arbiter of what is good and bad. The only person whose opinion of whether a life is wasted that actually matters is the person living it. We can hold opinions on whether another person's life is wasted, but it doesn't matter. We don't get to decide that. If they find joy in something I would hate, they should do it. My opinion doesn't matter. That's the basis of why I think the article misses the mark. There is no right way or wrong way to 'use your education'. Each person gets to decide how to do their thing, and to decide whether they are succeeding or not. Success to me might look like failure to you (we may be measuring different things with different value systems).

skeptrune 3y ago

Holy hell education is meaningless

CalChris 3y ago

Typically, Berkeley was more brutal. The EECS Undergraduate Handbook (graduation contract) used to say that the prestige of the Berkeley degree increases with distance from the Campanile.

alephnerd 3y ago
* is Berkeley is still hell and I'd hire a Cal grad in a heartbeat, but that is also why Cal is an elite program

citrusx 3y ago

Feels like there's so much massive societal damage coming out of Stanford (Theranos, FTX, so much more...), that it's kind of a dying platform. If I'm a high-achieving high-schooler, I'm going to have real second thoughts about applying here.

Tabishbhai110 3y ago

[flagged]

Tabishbhai110 3y ago

[flagged]

Tabishbhai110 3y ago

[flagged]