A Letter to College Students

Thank you. Good points all.

I don't think it has value - my former co-founder Kyle Vogt is building self driving cars and he didn't graduate from college. I just think you learn a lot faster in a startup environment.

Great advice, though I'd make explicit a single caveat: work at least a year or two at a reputable tech company after college. It's actually a more effective environment for networking (it seems every person in tech wants to strike out on their own these days), you can build up a cash base to extend your personal runway, and most importantly you'll have a more coherent and believable narrative about the direction you're taking, in case you ever need to be employed again.

Plus knowing how abysmal the corp life is will keep you driven ;)

I'm a 19 year old midwestern college student at an urban school who loved the article, especially the part about being social. My dad always said "it's not what you know, but who you know." Seeing the kinds of connections he made in college, his work, and his church pay off in astounding ways taught me a lot about that.

However I've always had trouble with meeting other people that like to code. Striking up a conversation with people in my CS classes usually ends up in a "don't bother me" sort of situation, and many people I do meet are less into coding and more into video games.

Finding a job in my school's understaffed IT department (help desk) has been a good start to the workforce, but is soul crushing. I'm never rewarded for anything that goes well, and people only remember the times I made customers angry. The job might give me some experience and a nice blip on my resume, but I feel it's setting me up for a soul-crushing sysadmin job at some major corporation around my city.

From the perspective of somebody not even two decades old hopefully you understand that without much social or business experience a lot of these actions are difficult, especially meeting people eager to collaborate on technical projects. You can look back on your life and wish you prepared yourself for your adult life better, but in the moment as a youth there's so much stimuli on campus and paths that I could choose that it really weighs down on me. Do I keep working hard at a boring IT job to make a comfortable, stable living as a sysadmin, settle down with a nice midwestern wife and some kids, and join a Protestant church? Do I work for the Peace Corps for a couple years in China to improve my Chinese language proficiency and risk having rusty tech skills? Do I try moving to some high-rent city with a lot of startups and risk crashing and burning? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Thanks for reading my rambling slice of life, and thanks for writing this article. It got me thinking more about my future than I typically do on a Friday night in the dorms and helped me get some stuff out of my head. I'll be keeping a lot of these points in mind as ways to improve my chances for success.

"real skills": not sure what you mean by this. Later you say "useful" and "different", is that the intended reading of "real", or is it advice to ignore the poseurs?

"make friendships with really smart people. So get out of the dorm room or the library and be social."

In my experience, those "really smart people" didn't get that way by the abundant time spent not studying, so isn't more likely that you will find the smart people studying? just a thought.

Thank you so much for this post Michael! I found this post really insightful not only in the sense that it gives confidence to us who prefer to build stuff to solve real world inefficiencies vs getting perfect grades (but at the same time value the human infrastructure that universities have), but in the sense that you are giving really good criteria to value other "studentpreneurs" as co-founders of something a little bit more serious than a side-project.

I would like to ask you: Some of us have parents that are pretty liberal and open to these alternative career paths; but there are extremely talented people (genius coders, who are entrepreneurial enough to work on their side projects, who have a low burn rate and no student debt, etc.) who have parents that are really conservative and want to define a career path for them. As a co-founder and close friend of such kind of people, how should one deal with such situation?