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Comment by anotherbrownguy | Hacker News Reader

>Call me cynical, but one thing college teaches you is to avoid assuming most people are like yourself.

That's like the one thing that it doesn't teach you. Everyone is expected to be interested in the same selection of things and learn the same things in the same way or not get good grades.

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>> one thing college teaches you is to avoid assuming most people are like yourself.

> That's like the one thing that it doesn't teach you.

Huh? You didn't get to know people who weren't like yourself?

Since the people there chose the same path as me, they were in fact more similar to me (similar demographics, hobbies, ...).

"Same path" as in... "K-12, then college"? By that standard, when you start working, everyone has had the same path as you, too -- "education, then work".

And how can you even say "more similar" without specifying more similar than what?

More similar than the most of other people I met/know. I studied CS. When I started working, there are (compared to my CS studies) people from different colleges, or without higher education at all, artists, HR, managers, ... They are much more diverse than people from my college.

You say "compared to my CS studies" to argue your point, then conclude with "than people from my college"? Was there nobody but CS majors in your college? Or did you just never take the opportunity to go meet them when there were tons of them in your college?

I have met more people who aren't like myself outside college.

> I have met more people who aren't like myself outside college.

And this supposedly implies "That's like the one thing that [college] doesn't teach you"?

That was a hyperbolic response to a hyperbolic claim.

These are both more "I..." comments. When "I" went to college "my" experience was X so therefore...

Assumption: experiences in college are incredibly diverse based on multiple factors

You're assuming a lot of homogeneity in those people, but just seeing innumerable children pass through is a chance to see a load of variability, even if it's not fully representative of the whole world.

There's a ton of variability to see in the population of those who go to college and feel the constraint of grades and majors.

Or did people want visiting one corner of campus to be like visiting the corner of China, and the other corner to be like visiting Australia? Well, sorry, nothing but real money and travel can substitute seeing the world, but yes, college is an eye-opener in terms of people.

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