Being an excellent robot (Erica Goldson Graduation speech)

Post by Nursie » Tue, Jul 16, 2013, 5:29 PM UTC

alexvr wrote: post #33

Nursie wrote: post #2

I find that hilarious. Particularly "While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment", "while others sat in class and doodled..." and "while others were creating music..." This seems remarkably naive. The doodlers did not all become artists, many were just bored or uninterested. The ones missing assignments were probably…

I disagree. While the majority of smart kids at school do follow the traditional route, doing their work, conforming to the system (sometimes because it's easy for them, and they may as well take advantage of their brains to get a decent job, and sometimes because they're simply blind), there are always a number of exceptions. You have exceptionally-bright kids who don't know what to do with their lives and slack in…

Post by mathattack » Tue, Jul 16, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #24

mathattack wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. I think society has gotten better at stretching out the shelter over time. It used to be undergrad + law school, then figure it out. Now it's undergrad + banking/consulting/TFA + MBA + McKinsey, then figure it out. Or for the lucky who were REALLY into programming, we knew early on that grades didn't matter as much so long as we learned enough to be valuable, since it's a field that's a relative meritoc…

> since it's a field that's a relative meritocracy I couldn't know this, I could just sincerely hope it's true, for all the years I played with programming, neglecting my duties as part of an educational system. I believed that I can become good at this thing called programming and I believed that it will be enough. Almost twenty years later I'm still astonished that my childish, naive belief was indeed true. That in…