Comment by _wc0m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _wc0m | Hacker News Reader

Recurse center (nee Hackerschool) changed my life.

I was a miserable PhD student, playing around with poor-quality datasets, battling office politics and learning a bit of Python on the side. Saw Recurse Center as an opportunity to see if I might fit in with a techy crowd and perhaps provide some new inspiration.

Went, loved every minute, met wonderful people, learned loads, had a blast. Got home, quit my PhD, quickly landed a developer job and haven't looked back since. My only regret is not doing so sooner.

My story is not unusual. Apply to Recurse Center!

Hey, I'm the one that posted this story and I am headed to RC next month :-) So excited! What did you work on/study?

I spent a lot of time learning new languages and filling in my missing computer-science education. You can do a lot in 3 months if you have no distractions! I was probably there 60 - 70 hours a week and have never managed to hit such a sweet spot of motivation, inspiration and productivity before or since. My PhD was a colossal waste of time in comparison. Actually it made me totally re-evaluate my ideas about education in general.

A random selection from memory:

  * Emulator and debugger for a particular embedded hardware (MSP430)
  * Website that scraped Rosetta Code and displayed it in a less-annoying form
  * Genetic algorithm for graph problems
  * Nand2Tetris course
  * Two weeks trying and mostly failing to learn Haskell (took me another year to really 'get' it)
  * All sorts of other fun/dumb stuff. Boggle solver! Endless project Euler problems! Super Meat Boy!

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