Someone has to mention Cornell. The undergrad community is intensely entrepreneurial, the CS department is top notch and you won't find nearly as many a-holes as at Harvard (half serious).
Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#42I'd highly recommend the University of Maryland's "Hinman CEOs" program. UMD has been pushing entrepreneurship very heavily in the past few years (especially in the engineering disciplines.)
The Hinman program provides mentors, classes, living/learning environments, conference rooms, and other facilities to help potential entrepreneurs. Additionally, they bring in a steady stream of successful entrepreneurs to speak, network, and help you on your way.
Add that to its close proximity to Washington D.C., good tuition, and highly ranked engineering/business departments, and you have a fairly good entrepreneurship package.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#43If you're a junior in high school, I'd take as many college level courses (mostly math and CS) as I could in your senior year and seriously consider skipping college.
I would normally never recommend this to anyone who cared about their future, but if you truly are an "aspiring start up entrepreneur", then you already know this is the right answer. In your case, college is an unnecessary detour.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#44Babson College for entrepreneurship. Any top 10 engineering school in the country for CS. You learn the same shit, it's the just level of immersion in the coursework and peer pressure that differentiate the school.
A lot of mentions of Stanford here but how many of you actually went to school there? I swear to god somedays I think most of you are just card-carrying cargo-cultists.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#45If you live in the midwest, I highly recommend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It's a top 5 CS program.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#46Stanford has an amazing campus and most everyone there is very positive. It is like a little island for overachievers.
MIT is great but the attitudes and environment are quite different. The campus is in a much more urban environment. Rather than the upbeat attitude at Stanford, MIT is more of a tough-love kind of school. "You might think you are smart, but really you suck and are lazy" is how motivation works at MIT. At Stanford it is more like "yo, we're all super smart. let's be rad and play ultimate frisbee later." I think it has something to do with the wildly different climates.
This is very qualitative, but from my experience MIT is probably a better place to go if you want to do a form of engineering that requires crazy smarts that isn't computer science. Like hardcore electrical engineering, or bioengineering or material science or designing atomic weapons. Stanford is better for straight-up computer stuff.
If you can get into one of those two schools you are a step ahead of the game. They are the only two schools in the USA that are worth their super inflated tuitions. Otherwise I'd just go to the best school you can get into that costs the least amount of money.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#47Whichever college allows YOU to grow creatively, socially, and intellectually. This college is not necessarily Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, or Somestate University. As far as a degree, whichever you enjoy the most. Don't focus on the product; rather, HOW you reach it.
I think this needs some context. I felt much the same way when I decided on a college, and made my decision based on that. I won't exactly say I was wrong, but 7 years later I've got a better perspective on the tradeoffs involved. Understand that your raw intellectual prowess is a depreciating asset. I'd guess that I peaked in programming ability at about 19, and 18-20 seems a pretty common age range based on famous…
Sadly, the attitude evident in the last two paragraphs of your comment runs deep in young people. Zuckerberg at YC Startup last year, age discrimination suit at Google, etc. Logan's Run in Silicon Valley.
It's also upside down compared to other fields like medicine and writing. In medicine, you make your "mark on the world" after you go through significant training, which ends around 30 or later.
As far as making it entrepreneurially:
1) If it depends purely on intelligence or hacking ability, PlentyOfFish.com and other success stories wouldn't have made it. Even if it's somewhat true, consider that the decrease of your ability with age should be less than the interpersonal variability of ability. (50 yo Einstein > 20 yo Homer Simpson)
2) If it depends on luck, don't worry about age.
3) If it depends on connections, you get more with age.
4) If it depends on others' perception of your youth.... you may be in trouble.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#48Also is a computer science or business degree recommended? Computer science. Hands down. am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur. I think that Stanford is obviously the best choice, they push entrepreneurship pretty hard. But at the same time, I don't really think that it's the school, it's the student. And, Stanford is really expensive. If you get in to Stanford and can get…
"as long as you have money for rent, ramen and bandwidth"
Can you reformulate that to use three 'R's?
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#49The school of hard knocks? Dropping out seems to be a common path for successful entrepreneurs. Witness Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, to name a few in the technology space. Follow subjects that energize you; they are the ones that you will continue to get better at after you graduate. Entrepreneurship has very little to do with programming or college, and a lot to do with a relentless focus on value creation.
Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this needs some context. I felt much the same way when I decided on a college, and made my decision based on that. I won't exactly say I was wrong, but 7 years later I've got a better perspective on the tradeoffs involved. Understand that your raw intellectual prowess is a depreciating asset. I'd guess that I peaked in programming ability at about 19, and 18-20 seems a pretty common age range based on famous…
Sadly, the attitude evident in the last two paragraphs of your comment runs deep in young people. Zuckerberg at YC Startup last year, age discrimination suit at Google, etc. Logan's Run in Silicon Valley. It's also upside down compared to other fields like medicine and writing. In medicine, you make your "mark on the world" after you go through significant training, which ends around 30 or later. As far as making it…
Markus Frind is quite a bit more intelligent than many people give him credit for, eg. he discovered the then-longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers in 2004. Same goes for many other entrepreneurs that people assume were just lucky - James Hong, Marc Andreesen, Brad Fitzpatrick, etc. And the variation due to age may be much less than the variation due to person, but remember that there are many more smart people than there are millionaires. Empirically, it seems like you need to be smart, young, and lucky.
Also - I doubt few people would dispute that succeeding with a tech business requires the ability to concentrate intensely for long periods of time. (Something I'm obviously failing at, having been back to news.YC 3 times so far today.) Certainly many young people lack that, but for a given person, it seems likely that they're better able to do that at 20 or 25 before things like family, business connections, or reputation intercedes.
It definitely is upside down compared to medicine or writing, but that's because computer programming is nearly in unique among human fields in being subject to lots of chaotic effects. Almost every other body of knowledge is additive, but in software, small changes to requirements at the base layer can have ripple effects that invalid your whole system's design. That's why the software industry seems to undergo major tectonic shifts every 10 years or so, each of which creates lots of opportunities for young entrepreneurs who haven't learned the now-obsolete ways of "how things are done".
When I was a kid, the hot new field was microcomputers, the programming language was assembly (no wait...Pascal. no wait...C), and the largest platform was Windows. When I was a teenager, the hot new field was the web, the hot programming languages were Perl and PHP and Java, and the largest platform was Netscape. Now that I'm in my twenties, the hot new field is rich Internet applications, the hot programming languages are Flash, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby, and the largest market is Internet Explorer. I can almost guarantee that the hot field, language, and platform will be different in 10 years, and all the technical skills I've learned so far will be obsolete.
Edit: On reflection, it's not really software as a whole that's chaotic so much as the leading edge of software, i.e. the edge where you can still have a viable startup. If you're making a desktop app, the tools and skillsets are only slightly different from making a desktop app in 1995. If you're making a webapp that's just a sequence of forms, the tools from 1998 will work fine. But those are mostly solved problems: either there's an off-the-shelf solution that's already been built, or you can hire one of an army of consultants that knows how to build one. The leading edge, by definition, involves tackling problems that haven't been solved before, and so there's no advantage to experience in solving them.