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Comment by aik | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad this has been said -- this is very true.

I have two comments:

>> "College was my biggest mistake?" ...it sure as hell isn't mine.

How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure? Firstly, opportunity cost is an impossible thing to calculate with certainty, especially when dealing with something so incredibly costly both in terms of time and money.

If you find yourself reasonably discerning, and learning efficiently what you are out to learn, and enjoying it and life, then great, you're likely in a good place.

"Double majoring", having an OK GPA, working two jobs and being middle class -- these all say absolutely nothing about whether you're making a mistake or not.

>> I get to be surrounded by people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am (often, they're more so.)

Now that means a lot, and congrats for finding a place that has such an unusual but hugely beneficial atmosphere!

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> How do you know it's not yours? Or rather, how can you be so sure?

Well then how does the author knows that his assessment is the correct one? I agree with the GP for three reasons: (1) I am not a super intelligent, 140 IQed, childhood prodigy who can learn so much faster than most if not all of my peers that I find the courses in my university program slow/unnecessary. (2) I fail at keeping myself motivated for months without direction, peer support and proper schedule. I am more likely to slag off in a side project that I am doing than in a course project that I have to do. (3) I am also more likely to learn things that are absolutely necessary but I personally don't find interesting (Logic Design, for example was one such topic).

> people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am

I think that is largely a function of how good the university is and how likely you are to identify motivated people. I was lucky to find some really motivated people around me who would challenge everything they encounter. I am much more passive than they are during sleep and just observing them struggle to tackle the weirdest problems was worth it. I am of course, not from a US university. My 5 year program (B.Tech. + M.Tech) would have costed me not more than $20K as a large part of my academic expenses are subsidized by our government. But all I can say is that at a good university, neither is this behaviour unusual or is it rare.

The job lead I got from my college advisor alone was worth the opportunity cost. And the humanities classes opened my mind up in ways wikipedia just can't dream of.

Yeah that's exactly the part that is so hard to quantify -- the liberal arts component. The purpose of all gen eds is basically to "open your mind", ie. to refine you as a human being. But what high school student goes to college for this purpose? Or a better question, what high school student truly knows that, or understands what that means? The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.

I did, I had a rather high IQ, and solid high-school achievements so I could probably gone to MIT etc, instead I went to a small, local, and cheap liberal arts school. One of the things I realized in HS was being a slightly better programmer is not really that important and does not actually make you significantly more money etc. But, avoiding debt and actually having fun in collage is worth a hell of a lot.

It took 3.5 years plus ~70k. I did learn quite a lot both from computer classes and the more liberal arts. But, in the end it was the social scene that IMO was the most important part.

PS: I did take 23 credit hours one semester just to see what it was like, and even making mostly A's with one B I think I learned more when I had free time than I did cramming in more course work.

That's the way I looked at it. Get through it without a lot of debt and be a big fish in a little pond.

I'm smart enough to work on "hard" problems, but the stuff I do now is interesting, and while my gross income is lower, my net income is quite a bit higher.

I love how so many liberals that would never dream of insulting someone for being poor have this attitude that if you didn't go to college, you are some kind of uncultured hick. Somehow beneath all those baristas with hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt.

>The only thing ever discussed seems to be how job-ready you are at graduation time.

This is the opposite of what I saw before the recession. Maybe I am hanging out with wealthier people than you are? or maybe you are just too young to remember a time before the recession. I don't know. As far as I can tell, at least until the recession hit, considering how much money you'd make when you got out of college was considered extremely déclassé. College was all about finding yourself and becoming a better-educated person. Only the uneducated, uncouth hicks actually thought about money. How gauche!

Of course, now with the recession on, a whole lot more people find it impossible to pretend to not be poor, and actually taking steps to see to it that you can feed yourself later in life are gaining some social acceptance.

Personally, I'd say that I learned a very similar lesson to the barista when I bought a BMW during the first dot-com. You see, pretending to be rich is really expensive.

Yeah, I tried to warn my friends, but they all looked down on the idea. Now that they're out of college, most of them are working retail. They have no idea how much they owe or when it might be paid off--math is scary, so they just defer and defer and make the minimum payment when necessary.

Of course, given their relative inability to comprehend fiscal realities, almost all of them live with their parents. Any free money they have they immediately blow on unnecessary things (trips, designer clothing, etc) instead of even trying to get out from under their loan debt.

I really hope that people come around some day, because I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills. Not all of us have parents we can move back in with, you know? But even that concept is offensive to them.

People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.

>I'm really sick of people treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills.

you've gotta choose your friends and your peers. I'm not saying you should always insist on friends that accept you for who you are, it can be good to have peers that challenge you, but you need friends that would admire you if you became the person you want to be.

A whole lot of the misery of my younger life can be traced back to that. It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.

>People spending money they don't have on useless status signifiers just pisses me off. So irresponsible.

but... that's a lesson that needs to be learned through experience. Really, that's a big part of why I think the fact you can't get out of student loans the usual way is such a big problem; I mean, when I was that age, making my own stupid decisions, no bank would be idiotic to loan me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were, I'd have ended up bankrupt and the bank would have had to take the hit, as they should, for making such a boneheaded loan.

>It's not fun to be in a situation where you have to lower yourself in your own eyes to raise yourself in the eyes of your peers.

That's exactly how I feel all of the time. If I am who I am around normal people, they get all insecure about their intelligence. Technical people tend to accept me and make me feel so at home it's amazing, but they're a very small minority of the population where I'm at compared to the non-tech savvy. I wish I could learn how to interface with normal people better without compromising my identity and interests.

I think I've been there. My advice? put more effort into finding more of the sort of people you want to be around. You might need to move, too, but moving alone won't do it. The key is to initiate relationships. It's better (well, better for you) to be loud and slightly annoying than to be so quiet you don't have a chance of initiating relationships with people you meet. (I mean, by all means, desist when people tell you to go away. But don't be afraid of embarrassing yourself by initiating a conversation with a stranger.)

The thing is, most nerds (and most of the people that nerds get along with) are kinda introverted. Introverted people tend to not initiate new relationships. If you wait around for other people to initiate relationships, you will only be able to choose among the extroverts that like you, so practice going out of your way to initiate contact with people you think you might get along with. You don't have to be an extrovert; but you do have to initiate conversations, extrovert-style, at least until you find your group.

Moving to an area with more of your target person type helps a lot, too. I mean, I meet all sorts of interesting people, for instance, waiting in line for BBQ. Living in a higher-density area gives you more people to meet, and some high density areas have more of us than others. I'm in silicon valley, which is medium density, but you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.

If you are like me, learning to better interface with 'normal people' won't solve the problem. In fact, I suspect the real problem is that I see 'normal people' and I see 'my people' - but I haven't been able to overcome that.

Thank you very much for your advice.

treating me like shit for actually getting a worthwhile degree that'll lead to a career that can pay the bills

People treat you like shit for your choice of major? Hasn't happened to me (engineer) but if anybody did this to me I would choose to spend time around different people.

A lot of people have looked down on me for it. Especially arts/liberal arts majors who have graduated and now make like...8-12K/year with their degree. They like to imply that they're the better person because they went to college for ~knowledge's sake~ or whatever. (Like I don't also love learning???)

Ah, got it. Sounds like a rationalization based on envy and resentment.

As in, their college experience isn't paying off financially, but they are better than you for pursuing pure love of knowledge rather than chasing the filthy dollar.

If you hadn't gone to college you would have been doing something else during those years and you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else. You can know that the job lead you got was good, but you have no way of knowing that your lead was better than you might have gotten by going to a jobs fair or some sort of special-interest convention or local community center.

And note that you could have taken humanities courses at a community college or audited them for free at a private college or done self-study. You don't have to be paying full college tuition to "open your mind" that way.

I took my humanities courses because I was required to. At the time, I would have been happy if all of my classes were math/CS. But afterwards, as in, a few years later, I realized that I probably would have learned most of the technical stuff on my own. It was being forced to study the non-technical that really taught me something new and interesting that I likely wouldn't have learned on my own.

This year marks ten years since I graduated. I cannot prove that college was a worthwhile thing, but I look back on that time very favorably.

you could have gotten job leads from somebody else somewhere else.

I'm not sure this is really true. I wasn't out of school yet, I had very few contacts. In fact after that first job I was effectively out of work for 9 months. College let me go to classes a bit, study a bit, and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time, while still getting the benefits of a huge professional network at the end.

Hitting up job fairs for months on end was equally effective as following up on a single email my advisor sent me.

Well, I guess you could take a humanities class...or, you could, you know, get a library card.

Believe it or not, there are actually sources of information outside of wikipedia and $1000000000/credit college courses. Amazing, right?

The big difference is the discussions with a group of other people (especially great: of different majors!) and a professor who knows what you're talking about and how to steer the conversation. Trying to understand a book and trying to understand people is very different.

I had a great seminar this semester where we would talk about "knowledge" from a philosophical, historical, theological and physical point of view with the respective students and professors. Often, we were none the wiser about our original question afterwards, but had had a great discussion, and quoting the philosophy professor, "understood the question better". Again, my point - it is not about gained knowledge, and the way a conversation engages your mind is hard to replicate with a book.

But then, I live in Germany and can live off 6000€ including university costs for a year, so YMMV.

Here I feel that it's a lot more common to pay $20,000+ a year to have a professor read off a slide. Most professors I've had can't steer for shit. (Although I've had 2 philosophy professors who were very good at it! They are in the minority, unfortunately.)

You also have to keep in mind that colleges here will accept just about anyone (no matter how stupid) if they have the money to pay--from what I've heard, Europe's system is free for those who are smart enough to get in, and the entrance standards filter out a lot of the dumbasses who would otherwise just destroy the intellectual level of the class discussion.

I'm not talking about sources of information. I mean someone who knows what books in that library are worth reading. And honestly, I don't remember 90% of the "information" I learned in college, but I learned a ton of new ways of approaching information that I don't think I would have learned except by example.

You could listen to someone tell you what books are worth reading, or you could learn critical thinking by trying to work it out for yourself. In the real world, you often have to parse data from a variety of sources without much guidance from a higher authority as to what you should consider legitimate.

I'm not saying that college isn't helpful for some people--but it's certainly not the only way.

Sorry but I think having a guide who knows things that have been passed down over centuries is much better than re-inventing the wheel every generation. It's like getting a 2,000+ year head start on understanding how to think. By all means get some experience in the actual territory but don't forget to take a map.

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