201–210 of 278 posts
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I like the idea. Money up front now, for a percentage of your future earnings.
Oregon is on it. http://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/oregon_students_partner/
http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2013/07/oregon...
Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…
You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…
Don't worry: I've tried to show that P = NP and know that while I've had some candidate ideas I don't have a good idea or a proof. And, I've nearly never written a bad proof; once catch on to how proofs are done, they are surprisingly easy to check for correctness.
Studying is not a full time job -- I was heavily self taught in math and totally self taught in computing and nearly never studied full time. E.g., I read Nearing on linear algebra, Halmos 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces', Fleming 'Functions of Several Variables', yes, with the exterior algebra, and much more while working full time in mostly DoD work around DC. I did the research for my Ph.D. dissertation in stochastic optimal control independently in my first summer in graduate school.
Edit: There's a better answer in this thread in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6177643Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…
I self-studied some amount of pure mathematics, having only an undergraduate CS degree and while having a 40 hour a week day job, and while it's definitely harder and slower than learning it at a university, it's not unrealistic. If you look hard enough, there are books with proof-based exercises with answers in the back (example proofs) that you can use to check your understanding (Spivak's Calculus, books from Spri…
Halmos, Rudin, and Spivak 'Calculus on Manifulds' were at least at one time the main references in Harvard's Math 55 as at
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man/?searchterm=Sommers
Your last sentence is on the center of the target of reality.
Ingrid, If you are reading this then please take another shot at the FAFSA. You are quite right that the computer systems and standard rules screwed you over. That is why Financial Aid Advisers (the ones at your school) can make judgement calls on a case by case basis to override the computer system. Specifically, there are two qualities of your described situation which qualify you for such an override. 1. You menti…
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You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…
I self-studied some amount of pure mathematics, having only an undergraduate CS degree and while having a 40 hour a week day job, and while it's definitely harder and slower than learning it at a university, it's not unrealistic. If you look hard enough, there are books with proof-based exercises with answers in the back (example proofs) that you can use to check your understanding (Spivak's Calculus, books from Spri…
Also lots of people have convinced themselves of lots of silly things. You can probably find dozens of papers from people with bachelors in math (or no degree) claiming they have solved P=NP. A lot of these turn out to be completely bogus, but the authors nonetheless thought they were serious attempts.
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I don't see how HECS is a lot better than the US system. "Poor" people still have to pay 10% (accumulated) interest on the loan (it does not matter if the interest is called 'discount') and you still leave the system with a loan of $18-30k. If a country wants to advance technologically or academically, it should have cost-free universities like there are cost-free schools. Why do people not understand that?
Why do people not understand that many people are poor not because they were born into something less than a utopia but because they are lazy or happy that way or they make bad decisions or are just plain ignorant? Have you once stopped to consider that there may not be anything close to a perfect system for lifting people out of poverty? Perhaps a system that provides possibility that requires loads of effort to tak…
Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…
> And from the famous Ivy League schools, it's generally easier to get accepted for a Ph.D. than for a Bachelors. Since in many cases PhD is basically free, it is by far more competitive than Bachelors.
I never got anywhere trying to get into Princeton as an undergraduate, with average SAT scores over 700, but did get accepted in the math (or statistics) department as a graduate student. I'd read lots of John Tukey's work -- uniformity in topology (in the back of Kelley's 'General Topology'), Tukey's lemma in axiomatic set theory, stepwise regression, power spectral estimation (Blackman and Tukey), the FFT (Cooley and Tukey), and 'Exploratory Data Analysis', had been working in applied math and computing, wrote G. Watson, and got accepted. I also got accepted in the Division of Applied Math at Brown and in Operations Research at Cornell. I went to Hopkins.
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This is false. I studied Maths at Cambridge and learned some courses completely on my own.
It's false that any of what I said can be true for some (or many) students? How do you determine if you're one of those students?
As such, I think it's ridiculous to go up to anyone and tell him/her to just "study by yourself", I could give a maths book to a biologist and that person would understand absolutely nothing without guidance.
I don't get it. Why can't you get loans? You don't pay them back while you are in school, and afterwards the minimum cost per month is pretty low. I had full, $16k per term FAFSA support for 12 terms, and then needed one more to finish some things up (poor planning). Federal student loans saw me through. Although, yes, it's immensely frustrating that they take whatever money they can. I spent all the money I saved up…
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This is false. I studied Maths at Cambridge and learned some courses completely on my own.
Seconded. Math is one of the most easily self teachable subjects. The field of study is objects of mind (unless you're a platonist.) Literally no materials required except pen/paper, a brain and maybe a straightedge and compass. The point of math is not to do endless worked exercises. It's to understand mathematical objects and prove interesting things about them. You can generate unlimited problems for yourself by i…