Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

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At 12 years old my sister and I were "off the dole" as my parents put it. No more allowance, which had topped out at $2.75/wk. If we wanted money, we were expected to use our heads. We ended up mowing lawns, gardening and shoveling after having my mom introduce us to the neighborhood.

At 14 I wanted a computer to mess around with. That's fine, but the family computer wasn't for that. I went with some juniors and seniors in the computer club to dumpster dive behind businesses, or sometimes to the dump itself. Ended up with a working stack of 386s to put FreeBSD and Linux on.

I had a part-time job at 15 to save for a car, because at 16 we were told we were going to be on foot. At 16 I used to take on contract work that one of my teachers had to pass up, doing web-development. Mostly PHP, ColdFusion and some Classic ASP. Two of those sites, 12 years later, are still running just fine on the custom CMS built for their needs.

I had partial scholarships to top tech schools, but the debt load of going to CMU or WPI was still approaching that of a home mortgage where I grew up. I had saved enough money to go to state school and pay cash. Yet when I got there, I was completely underwhelmed. Bored out of my mind. There was very little I would learn until my 3rd or 4th years, they didn't end up applying AP course credit to get me out of 10x courses, and the social environment was akin to drunken day care (and I didn't need to be on campus to make new friends or go on dates). After 3 semesters I ended up in the Vice Chancellor's office with my parents having a very long, very candid discussion about the pros and cons of me sticking it out. They're weren't paying for it, but they were livid at the idea of me dropping out. Long story short, no one could punch a hole in my argument and I even managed to get a partial refund for the 3rd semester. I had until the end of the week to pack up and move out.

I'll go back eventually for a proper engineering degree when I'm bored building trading systems for investment firms.

Point is, nothing like being stuck with a dilemma (no more allowance, so unless you want a video game, we expect you to find a way to make money) and being forced to work out a solution at the ripe old age of 12. I learned more about how to further myself in my free time than I ever did through some state-mandated curriculum.

Would I recommend this exact approach to everyone? Absolutely not. Yet there's always a playing field everyone can succeed on, and there's an immense amount of value in kids finding that out for themselves with a bit of guidance.

It's quite possible to do it in less, if things go right, though in the areas of CS I'm familiar with doing it in under 5 is a stretch (maybe if you're doing a pure theory thesis). But often things don't go right. Lots of people end up writing their PhD on their 2nd or 3rd project, not their first, either because it turned out not to interest them or turned out to be fatally flawed. Or they end up having to switch advisors for reasons ranging from personality clashes to the advisor leaving their university.

Things can also go faster or slower depending on how funding goes. The ideal is to be funded on a grant or fellowship to do your own research full-time. Less ideal is being funded on a grant to do something other than your research, often code-monkey implementation for some big DARPA project or something, which means you basically have a separate part-time job; or if you're supported by TAing, that's a different kind of part-time job.

Of all persons to whom pithy lines are attributed, Mark Twain is by far the most likely to NOT be the genuine attribution.

http://www.amazon.com/Quote-Sleuth-Manual-Tracer-Quotations/...

I have never been able to verify that Twain wrote the usually quoted form of that line, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." (There are a lot of scholars who study such things.) I have seen one attribution of that line to Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Leacock

which to me is a much more believable attribution, but one I am also unable to verify.

Mark Twain did have some great lines about schools, of which my favorite is

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."

-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1903) 2:295

/pedantry

Note that this merely measures the time from start to finish, including breaks.