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Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

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Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#71

Post by schmico »

jeffpersonified wrote: post #10

Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society. Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."

Very true. But this is a virtue of human nature, and power. And in business (very generalised) you have the efficiency cycle and the efficacy cycle. Bosses generally only want advice on how the company can become more efficient, to question efficacy is to question his/her judgement and power.

But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#72

Post by fivethirty »

jcnnghm wrote: post #53

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual though…

At the risk of sounding trite, college is what you make of it. If all you care about is trading in your four years and n-thousand dollars for a marketable degree, then of course you aren't going to feel like you learned anything, but I argue that this is your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding (aside: "actual learning and understanding" is an incredibly vague phrase and that bothers me. Oh well).

Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.

I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#73

Post by karamazov »

vecter wrote: post #68
jcnnghm wrote: post #53

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual though…

If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted). If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major,…

Even quantitative degrees just require patience and perseverance - it might be intimidating to be surrounded by people much better at math/physics/cs than you, but if you put in the time and effort, getting a degree in one of these subjects is very doable. It's a matter of effort rather than being smart.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#74

Post by alecbenzer »

maeon3 wrote: post #7

95% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of society. It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.

I occasionally drink and/or smoke. It has nothing to do with wanting to be cool. It has to do with feeling good and, to a slightly lesser extent, having something to do with friends. I don't really know anyone who actually drinks or smokes just because it's cool.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#75

Post by jcnnghm »

vecter wrote: post #68
jcnnghm wrote: post #53

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual though…

If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted). If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major,…

My major was computer science. It's still just a list of work. The math largely isn't as difficult as it is poorly explained and tedious. It's possible to obtain an intuitive understanding of most topics, and when you do, it's practically trivial to derive the underlying equations.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#76

Post by vecter »

karamazov wrote: post #73
vecter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted). If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major,…

Even quantitative degrees just require patience and perseverance - it might be intimidating to be surrounded by people much better at math/physics/cs than you, but if you put in the time and effort, getting a degree in one of these subjects is very doable. It's a matter of effort rather than being smart.

I definitely agree. On the other hand, I do think that someone who has walked through the fire and pounded their head against hard concepts for 4 years legitimately comes out smarter in some dimensions.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#77

Post by sliverstorm »

jcnnghm wrote: post #53

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual though…

It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years

Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that time in a lab with a professor, or in the library, or any number of countless opportunities to explore. For example, I still wish I had made the time to learn a little about quantum physics and general relativity (both out of the scope of my studies). I can still learn about those things now, but at a university you have classes, professors and students all at your disposal.

You might think that sounds senseless now, but you already know what interests you, and have probably already explored other territory.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#78

Post by vecter »

jcnnghm wrote: post #75
vecter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted). If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major,…

My major was computer science. It's still just a list of work. The math largely isn't as difficult as it is poorly explained and tedious. It's possible to obtain an intuitive understanding of most topics, and when you do, it's practically trivial to derive the underlying equations.

I agree that once you obtain an intuitive understanding of any topic, what once seemed incomprehensible is suddenly completely trivial. It's just getting to that stage that requires a lot of work. I studied computer science also and spent a ton of hours staring at equations. I figured it out eventually, and maybe I'm just slower than you, but it wasn't nearly as simple as you made it sound.

Getting back to the point: if you really weren't that challenged by your coursework, why didn't you seek more challenging material? I find it hard to believe that everything you could ever study in college would be so easy for you, or anyone for that matter. It's just a shame b/c you say how college is mostly worthless because you weren't really challenged, but it sounds like you could've gotten more out if it if you studied something that pushed your boundaries more.

Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

#80

Post by larsberg »

sliverstorm wrote: post #77
jcnnghm wrote: post #53

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual though…

It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that…

I did exactly that and can't recommend it highly enough. I finished the CS major in my first 2 years and then spent the next two years taking "independent study" courses and just generally hacking and doing research for a few different faculty members.

Protip: you can take "freshman physics/chemistry" as a senior if it's not a pre-req for anything else you need. And by then, you'll have learned to study more effectively than when you were a freshman and it'll be ~2 hours a week of work.

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