Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education?

#31

Post by CamperBob » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 11:53 PM UTC

riledhel wrote: post #15

rumpelstiltskin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If anything, it's school that can wait. Especially considering you can get a decently comprehensive CS education w/o paying mid-5 figures a year in tuition. Rather than giving all that money away needlessly, spend a fraction of it on room and board and spend the majority of your time teaching yourself. You'll be done way ahead of 4 yrs. And then jump into the startup world.

You don't go to college just to study.

Likewise, you don't launch a startup just to make money.

Re: Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education?

#32

Post by CamperBob » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 11:59 PM UTC

joshu wrote: post #10

Finish school. Startups will wait. In the meantime, see me re an internship.

Bad advice. By the time he enters middle age, the higher-education bubble will have long since popped. A college education will be cheaper than it is now, and will be available entirely online. Brick and mortar schools will be so desperate for students that they'll be offering zero-interest loans to get him to come back.

Conversely, due to family commitments and other aspects of real life, starting your own business is something that gets monotonically harder every minute until you retire.

Do it now, or it probably won't happen. Believe me, college is what will wait.

(Edit: Maybe I was too hasty in saying 'bad advice.' It's good advice if he actually takes it. If he doesn't have the kind of personal drive needed to ignore people who tell him to take the safe path through life and stay in school, then he may not be happy as an entrepreneur.)

Re: Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education?

#33

Post by ksolce » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

ohyes wrote: post #20

I know that some people will disagree with me violently, but you can self-learn pretty much any topic in CS as long as you are willing to put in the effort (any topic in any subject, really, the main factor is motivation). As someone who skipped straight to a masters, I know it is certainly doable to self educate. MIT open courseware might be a good place to start, although I've never used it myself. http://ocw.mit.e…

Same for Stanford. http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Youtube lectures, download through torrents available on the site.

Some are good, and all have a lot of documents attached (all accept the book, often)