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What I Learned In College

blackhole12.blogspot.com

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Re: What I Learned In College

#61

Post by selimthegrim »

blackhole wrote: post #50
navait wrote: post #7

Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs. What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!" Get it out…

Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's a disaster to everyone, not just me. To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special onl…

You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit out the marrow.

Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the PhD system. However, meaningful research will require interaction with interested colleagues to increase the chance of useful work being done. This can take place independent of the so called Ponzi scheme. While there is some truth to that description, it has no bearing on your refusal to engage with research as an undergrad and is totally dilatory. If you hold yourself to such high standards you should be ashamed to use that as an excuse.

Re: What I Learned In College

#62

Post by foobarbazqux »

navait wrote: post #7

Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs. What you get out of university is what you put into it. Want to be judged for something other than test taking? Get involved in research. Get involved in one of the many math and CS organizations your campus has. But you have to go get them yourself. Nobody's going to say "oh, you're so smart, please join our team!" Get it out…

> Sigh. Another special snowflake lamenting that the system didn't bend to exactly his needs.

s/system/blogger/ and pot meets kettle.

Re: What I Learned In College

#63

Post by alexgartrell »

It's really hard to not come across as ad hominem when you're disagreeing with OP's take on a personal experience, but I have very little patience for someone who sees or experiences something negative and does nothing more that cry into the wind. Fix the bug or find a work around. Lots of people managed to have great and very useful and applicable college experiences (I did) so maybe it's the OP who is wrong?

Re: What I Learned In College

#64

Post by sowhatquestion »

arikrak wrote: post #38

>Any task that can be reduced to simply following a set of instructions over and over is being done by robots and software. Agreed. Along similar lines: Any problem that can be solved with clearly-defined steps can be programmed so that a computer can solve it. Many areas of education, especially math-related ones, involve students learning to mechanically implement set procedures and formulas to solve problems. Thes…

I find it interesting there's one genre of indignant op-eds lamenting the death of creativity in education (including this one--not saying it's bad or formulaic, but it's definitely part of a genre).... and there's another genre lamenting that most college graduates are getting Starbucks barista type jobs that don't require creativity...

Much scarier than the idea that the education system is failing, is the idea that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the increasingly meager role that our society assigns it. As OP points out, there isn't a textbook with the answers for meaningful real-world problems--but there is one that tells you precisely how many pumps of chocolate syrup go in a grande mocha.

HN readers may be a priori more prepared to accept the watered-down version of this idea. "Of course the system needs creative problem solving, that's the most important part of my job!" If this describes you, congratulations, you are one of the priviliged few who has what the economist David Autor calls an "analytic" job. In fact, it's increasingly likely that the very purpose of your job is to ensure that there's no middle ground between you and those textbook-following Starbucks workers[1].

1: http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-jo...

Re: What I Learned In College

#65

Post by blackhole »

selimthegrim wrote: post #61
blackhole wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's a disaster to everyone, not just me. To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special onl…

You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit out the marrow. Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the PhD system. However, me…

What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and raytracing graphical techniques.

Grad school probably would have run me into the ground. It would have done so for all the wrong reasons. Again, I'm not interested in a hyper-competitive environment where I am judged on all the wrong things. I'd rather do my own research, and have actually made progress along several avenues I'm quite proud of, but currently haven't crystallized into something I can write a paper about (also due to time constraints).

Stop glorifying long work hours. They aren't productive.

Re: What I Learned In College

#66

Post by roryokane »

zanny wrote: post #32
msutherl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you know its name ruins your credibility.

He got it wrong, that is an OC to my knowledge. None of the major main cast are male ponies, and that isn't one of the side characters I know of. So consider his credibility untarnished. ~credibility is for curmudgeons.

I can confirm that his avatar is an original character. I don’t recognize it, having watched most of the show, and it’s not on http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/Pegasus_ponies.

Re: What I Learned In College

#67

Post by Tsagadai »

adamnemecek wrote: post #16
jmduke wrote: post #15

I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too. I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that d…

> I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I've had the same experience. And I hate how colleges seem not to recognize that.

Most of the value you can get from universities is through networking. If you don't meet anyone while you are there your degree truly is worthless. It isn't merely a matter of learning it for the sake of learning it is a matter of other people knowing that you know something or not.

Re: What I Learned In College

#68

Post by AlexanderMiller »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #20

Holy crap, UW's CS only has 200 graduates per year? For a school of that size, that's tiny. That's close to as many as most Ivy League schools these days, and their undergrad population is usually around 1/5 that of UW. This is especially sad, as CS courses should be pretty easy to scale, especially when you have a group of undergrads who want to teach. Not to mention how hypercompetitiveness drives out diversity, es…

I was an undergrad TA for the intro CSE classes at UW, and I was impressed by the way the courses were run and proud to be a part of it, so it hurts me to read comments like this.

You're right, there is a large pool of undergrads who want to teach, and the department takes full advantage of that. Unlike every other department at UW (that I know of), CSE pays undergrads to teach section (20 student classes that supplement the main lectures). Around 50 to 80 undergrads teach every quarter.

Furthermore, the instructors are insanely dedicated to diversity of minds. They constantly try to incorporate different ways of thinking into their courses to encourage students who might not be the math-y or computer-y types to understand their own potential. As evidence of this: the principal lecturer of the intro classes, Stuart Reges, gives keynote speeches at educational conferences on the success of the UW CSE program in attracting and retaining women in CSE. There is a huge amount of diversity among CSE majors -- double majors in art, business, math, linguistics, etc.

The problem is funding. Even though there is a huge demand for CSE degrees, the department doesn't have enough money to provide them. There's talk now of implementing differential tuition at UW, meaning that majoring in a high-demand field will cost you more than majoring in a low-demand one. This might allow the CSE department to fulfill the demand, but who knows if it's really a good idea.

Sorry for the long winded reply! Didn't mean for this to stretch out. I guess I took your comment a little too personally. :)

Re: What I Learned In College

#70

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kaitai wrote: post #36
jmduke wrote: post #15

I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too. I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that d…

I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself. That'll work fine until the things you want to learn are not written down anywhere. Most traumatic moment of grad school: Google thesis topic and…

Traumatic? I've written a paper (still unpublished), Googled the key words and key terms, and found that my old internet postings and arXiv copy were the only thing covering the material.

It's wonderful! I'm the only one who's fucking touched this stuff!

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