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Do I need to go to university?

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Re: Do I need to go to university?

#81

Post by falkaer »

oleks wrote: post #22
mvind wrote: post #14

I think the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs. This is a perk that not a lot of jobs in the real world offers. Almost nowhere else in a person's life are you given such an opportunity to invest in ones interests. But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.

You are not paid to go the university in Denmark. You are awarded credits by the government, and it is up to you to do something sensible with those credits. Don't waste them on needless courses! Learn that which will yield you (and the Danish government) the greatest benefits throughout the rest of your life.

You are given money (5.435 dkk monthly after tax) for attending university in Denmark and pay no tuition. This is in stark contrast to most other countries.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#82

Post by sanxiyn »

clarry wrote: post #70
tjpnz wrote: post #55

Can't speak for other professions but as a dev I've got no regrets in getting a CS degree. There's nothing you'll learn there that you couldn't maybe teach yourself but that's exactly the point. Unless you're a gifted autodidact you'll face considerable difficulty and will likely end up skipping through the important stuff coming away with a very flawed understanding indeed.

What's the important stuff? Where do I check my understanding?

I don't have a CS degree (or any degree for that matter), but I did review a CS degree program requirement and class materials. They do cover important stuffs. It's just that it doesn't take 4 years to learn them.

Required classes for a CS curriculum I reviewed were: discrete math, data structure, algorithm, computer architecture, programming language, operating system.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#83

Post by arijun »

For context, the author Chris Olah is a researcher at Open AI, who I think is one of the most clear and thoughtful writers in the space. He has a lot of articles on understanding ML models, and pioneers new methods of visualizations and interactivity to improve understandability of these models. If you're interested in the field I would highly recommend reading some of his articles on his blog or on distill.pub, a publication that he helped found with the express purpose of improving clarity of ML research.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#84

Post by crittendenlane »

fr2null wrote: post #15

I am 18 year old, I'm already working as a developer, and they have offered me a very nice full time job offer. I have been thinking about whether or not to go to university for most of the past year. In the end, I did choose to go to university. I will be working part-time to pay about 90% of it (including housing) which means I'll have practically no debt. The main reason for me to go, was that I don't want to de a…

You made the right choice. I just graduated, and can feel the effects already with my offers. More importantly, I made many valuable friendships, connections, and learned a ton of theory while publishing papers - all much harder to gain in the real world. Have a great time, and good luck!

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#85

Post by llarsson »

clarry wrote: post #70
tjpnz wrote: post #55

Can't speak for other professions but as a dev I've got no regrets in getting a CS degree. There's nothing you'll learn there that you couldn't maybe teach yourself but that's exactly the point. Unless you're a gifted autodidact you'll face considerable difficulty and will likely end up skipping through the important stuff coming away with a very flawed understanding indeed.

What's the important stuff? Where do I check my understanding?

Completely field dependent. What is your field?

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#86

Post by glangdale »

It's clearly possible to do pretty well without a university degree, and I think there's a few slam-dunk cases where you shouldn't get a degree:

1) You don't actually want to do the work to finish a degree, 2) your only options are to get an extremely mediocre degree, or 3) you will have to go into savage debt to get a degree.

Then there are the exceptional folks who could do well anywhere (who, presumably, would also be the high-flyers if they went to a university).

For everyone else, getting a decent degree should almost be a no-brainer. It will be useful. HR will like it, pretty much forever. The "lost years" of work experience will rapidly converge to insignificance (a point that seems lost on the folks who think that it's only university degrees become less significant as you get older).

You can do a range of subjects - some of them, shock horror, not narrowly vocational (a lot of the discussion here seems to imply that the sum total of what we should learn after high school somehow begins and ends with "programming and computer science"). Further, you can do these subjects at a much higher level and with greater intensity than the whole "hey, I read a couple books on Philosophy or did the first level of Duolingo in Spanish" or some such.

It should be a pleasant time where you get to try some new activities, meet a lot of people - maybe including a life partner, but maybe just good friends and some "early-adult romantic" relationships (which IMO are likely to greatly increase your chance of learning what you really want and how to get along in the real grown-up world).

The whole tertiary sector is pretty messed up right now (even pre COVID), so buyer beware. Don't do a crappy degree.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#87

Post by christophilus »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

It all depends on your goals. Is it to earn a decent living? I know millionaires who never went to university. They started a practical, blue collar business, and enjoyed that path. Is it to experience a broader culture? You could do the 100 Rabbits approach for a lot less money, and get something more interesting out of it. Is it to learn from one of the best minds in a particular field? University is probably the best fit.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#88

Post by sdan »

inapis wrote: post #39
sdan wrote: post #32

I'm a senior in high school and decided to. I started a startup and got invited for a YC interview(got rejected) and am onto another startup which is raising soon. Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their N…

>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now. 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, a college degre…

Also want to point out: I'm seriously going to college just for the name + network. I can easily learn everything at home via MIT open courseware or the syllabus many Stanford courses put online nowadays.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#89

Post by toyg »

sdan wrote: post #75
WalterBright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> college name matters Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.

I think you're right in many scenarios, but in the VC/startup world it def. seems to matter. I've been relentlessly reading people's stories and have been looking into how to get internships at various VC/tech companies and it always comes down to: which college you're going to. Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students (i snuck in) and I'm sure there's a lot of similar opport…

> Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students

Man, I thought this sort of discriminatory bullshit was limited to incestuous fields like law. Sad to see it infected the tech world as well.

Then again, it's a sign that the field is "normalizing".

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#90

Post by zvxczvxz »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

> It also enables me to do my job, I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well.

You apparently didn't learn to have a better look at those things at the university, it might surprise you some time.

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