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Comment by neodude | Hacker News Reader

I'm a CS and math major already, but I'm at a liberal arts college. I've learnt a lot forcing myself to write english literature papers, but I think I'd have fared better, academically, if I just went to MIT.

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MIT has compulsory English Lit etc too, AFAIK.

Oh. Well, I know nothing about MIT. I was discouraged from applying there because they don't have good financial aid - for international students. It turns out I'm not international after all, but who knew.

I quite liked english literature, actually. I just like hacking more... much more.

The thing is: I find liberal arts a very good idea, almost in the stereotypical way. I think by comparing perspectives, and doing lots of different disciplines seeds one's mind with lots of different ways of looking.

Maybe you should have gone to college in England. 3 year Bachelors programmes, but you pretty much do only what you're majoring in, which you decide in advance (i.e. when you're still in high school, which we call 6th Form). I did Mech Eng and I think we had the option of doing one course a year (out of 6-8 courses/year total) outside the department, and quite a few people didn't even do that.

Yup - I've heard that I would have liked Oxbridge very much. Apparently they just give you the syllabus and a reading list and meet you once a week to keep you on track? If I had known that when I was choosing colleges, I'd have jumped at it immediately.

I didn't consider the English system (though I'm somewhat a product of it) since I didn't want to specialize. It turns out not specializing was more excruciatingly difficult than I thought it would be, so now I'm deciding whether to run in the opposite direction.

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