Do I need to go to university?

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Please don't create side accounts to break the rules with, though, because doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In fact, I will go one further. Almost all self-taught physicists I have met are kooks - bonkers crazy conspiracy theorists.

Plenty of sites and forums to ask for help, give help and discuss what you learned.

Middle class Taiwanese family of white collar parents. Went to undergrad, dabbled in a few side projects and dropped out to work at a game company, a startup as an employee, and my own startup, in that order.

Learnings: found out I knew very little, and the branding/network/advice I could get from school would save me from reinventing the wheel over and over as a unvetted/newbie entrepreneur. This is hugely important and people don't assign enough value to it. For things where you need someone to hire you: you need to convince them somehow, and getting that piece of paper helps cover their butt and makes their life easier. I went back to school to have a bit of optionality.

Graduated and was planning on doing grad school. Spent first quarter basically playing D&D and League and barely scraped by academically, spent a few weekends hanging out with fellow Burners at a theme camp and collaborated on a few projects. I dropped out (for good this time) and pursued them -- all of them failed in the next 2 years, but what was useful was that I learned who were the good cofounder/advisors and how this kinda opaque process worked. Hit both a good startup as an advisor/early employee, then cofounded a cashflow business that I then bought out and proceeded to run for a decade.

Learnings: Knowledge and network are filled with plenty of opportunity costs -- and there's ways to make it both as a generalist and a specialist... ideally you can optimize for the intersect of what you want and what the world wants, and that ends up being the hard part. My own path was largely unplanned and opportunistic -- by hanging around an area of opportunity long enough and being ready I was able to access enough things to mildly succeed (didn't hit the stock jackpot, but I have a reasonable business).

Back to the question: the article answers it in the first few paragraphs - it depends on the person but is usually the "harder way". I only took the path because I had the priviledge/luxury to chase what I wanted, despite the vague expected value.

> Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents.

Haven't we already seen that this mindset is exactly what plagues academia with the most recent Admissions scandal? I mean parents of Wealth use that to leverage their children getting into that system to further entrench it and admissions offices use that to base their admissions on more than anything else.

I'm beyond the University Model, I have gotten to do some of the coolest things in my career not even mentioning I went to University and only based on merit and networking--though most assumed and asked loaded questions that reveal that I had indeed gone. But none of them asked for a transcript, as I don't even know where they are at this point.

I went to a low-tier (but highly applied to) CSU/UC, that has/had strong Research History, but saw it was all mis-allocated to serve a series of career academics with clout and had no real purpose other than to keep up the with 'publish or die' model and fluff their CVs. We as undergrads often had to work with broken lab equipment, limited class availability that prolonged your graduation date, and other budget cuts and this is was in an impacted major! As a student from the 2008 financial crises I don't envy what your time will be like in a STEM in this environment, frankly.

I dislike University for the horrible unforgivable debt loads it places on young people, but I HATE it for the waste of Human Capital it ultimately creates. It does occasionally offer some amazing discoveries but that seems more consequential than it does like the intended purpose; you need only see how University takes it's inflated share of researcher's grants and are legally allowed to take any and all IP from the research done.

You're free to do as you please, and you seem like a bright person so I hope its a full scholarship, but please understand that its disheartening to see what was supposed to be your most intellectually formulative years be wasted on such a horrible and corrupt system. Especially because as even before going in you understand the substance of the degree can be learned elsewhere and it serves no real purpose besides a form of perverse virtue signalling to HR.