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Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college? Most of what I did then is more or less useful for me on a daily basis as a foundation. I didn't go to a great school, although I was (un)fortunate enough that there was no obligation to take a minimum of humanities classes and I managed to take >95% STEM classes. I don't, for example, use what I learned in phys chem all the time but every now and then Michaelis-Menten kinetics or Gibbs free energy pops up and it was useful to have taken that class.
Don't the engineers and other STEMlords have to work, and don't they learn things that are useful for their careers? Is it just Americans that are lazy and credentialist?
It varies a lot by degree but generally only those in "engineering" and medicine really need to study. I've seen studies showing that the median university student spends less than 13 hours a week study related activities, engineers spend about 40h and those in medicine about 44h.
These two fields are of course a tiny part of the overall student population.
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Yes, American issue mostly: https://www.themotte.org/post/3654/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/426896?context=8#context
My undergrad was extremely rigorous and I had to work like a dog's dog.
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Did a Commerce degree and most of it's a blur when it comes to actual functional workplace skills acquired. I feel like anything outside of STEM/Finance/Accounting it's largely bullshit due to the august mandarin laptop bureaucracy generally being more vibe based than tying into particular skills.
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Nope, I remember a lot of nights spent studying and doing my homework for my CS degree. There was also a lot of time to trying and go pro in gaming though. I suspect non-stem people had more free time.
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I went to a magnet high school with a rigorous enough curriculum that even the chemical engineering program at a prestigious university was a step down in terms of difficulty, but I would still say I worked fairly hard.
Not that much I learned has been of use since then; most ChemE departments still teach as though all their students will end up working in oil and gas, when in reality less than 10% do these days.
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I majored in computer science at an OK school. I worked and studied pretty damn hard, volunteered for research, was a TA, all that good stuff. I also went to every party I could, did tremendous amounts of drugs, and played through lots of classic games. Maybe I should have gone somewhere more rigorous, but they didn't offer scholarships. I don't know if it matters really, I still got into FAANG straight out of college.
The key is that you knew to leave out the "chill" and "do nothing" parts.
I worked nearly full time throughout my studies, did decently in university (my professor gave me glowing praise over a decade after graduation when asked about me for one job) and still went to a whole bunch of parties and was active in student clubs. The trick was really to learn how to optimize and not waste effort on things that didn't matter beyond getting the required passing grade while saving the effort for those courses that actually mattered.
+1 on not wasting effort. I heard a bit of wisdom from an older student when I was a freshman. "If you want to get an A, that's fine. But if you end a course with a 99% you worked 9 points too hard." Another thing was not performatively grinding. So many other students would study in groups or in public where they could barely concentrate.
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I went to a prestigious US school who is famous for its relative rigor and resistance to fun and double majored in two STEM degrees. My stress level went down greatly when I graduated college and started working full time in a startup. My experience was similar among other people in my major, as well as some other groups such as pre-Med students and folks grinding for specific internships and career paths.
That being said, there was a minority who honestly coasted. I'm unsure globally who is more representative.
So you didn’t like your time at University of Chicago?
Should have gone to Bar Night
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This is why I'm not a spy.
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That wasn’t too subtle. But they already tried to be more like Harvard. Now because they don’t have the endowments of others they ran into financial difficulty and are massively boosting enrollment and basically prestige whoring. But it won’t be the quirky place it was. It will be the easiest place to buy a spot for a relatively smart kid going further which will likely end the days of not being fun.
By the time I went in 2016-2020, it's culture had already largely converged with other 'Ivy' related universities. Individual departments and individual coursework could be hard, but they can be hard at any university if the student elects to go that route. I haven't been there since, but I don't really think they have a meaningfully different culture like they may have had in the '80s.
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No. The Motte just has a contingent of college haters who forget non-software related engineering degrees exist. I've yet to see a self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.
I had to teach myself matrix math on the job. 0/10 - would not recommend.
Eh, matrix math I never found that difficult. Perhaps circumstance can present challenges, unless you believe you’re disadvantaged in mathematics. Curious, what was the job (if you don’t mind sharing)?
I work in software and I was doing a bunch of image processing on tiffs and jpegs.
It probably would have been easier if the project didn't also have a tight deadline, and my manager at the time wasn't also implying that my job was riding on it.
Ah, that makes sense. That’s foundational to digital imaging. Working on raster images is a gigantic pain in the ass, but multiplying coordinate vectors to digitally allow for infinite scaling makes the job so much easier (zero pixelation) once you’ve got it nailed down. If I was learning it for the first time, I wouldn’t want to be under that kind of pressure either.
The biggest issue was the fact that I was doing rotations and mirroring on images that were too big to fit into memory all at once. Not only did I have to learn the math, I also had to figure out how to do it in chunks. The tiffs were tiled. The jpegs were not. It was not a good time.
It sounds like you made it through and learned quite a bit though. A lot of people fold and stress out when they’re sandwiched between impossible circumstances. I’d always reminded myself in those moments I can’t afford to fail, so it actually became easier when I realized I didn’t have an out. You can bear anything when your back is really to the wall.
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Do note the "and" I put there. Now realize that matrix math is just the beginning and imagine having had to teach yourself all the rest, too.
I take no responsibility for any existential despair that may follow.
Oh believe me.
I didn't go into engineering for a reason.
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I can second that, EE was a massive PITA. The math was hard, the courses were unforgiving, and the amount of time it required for lab classes was too much. For my ASIC design labs you had to spend 14 hours in the open lab prior to the actual lab so you could finish the actual lab in the 3 hours provided. I recently amused myself by seeing some mass-market "cool special math" book on a friends coffee table, opening it and realizing it was just complex numbers + euler. What a throwback.
Apart from two thirds of the math courses and less than a dozen other courses I didn't find it that bad. Certainly not trivial but really nothing ridiculously difficult or laborous. I suspect a big part of this is Finnish university (and AFAIK European universities in general) not leaning nearly as heavily into making students do mandatory coursework just for the sake of doing work and absolutely nobody giving a shit about your grades as long as they weren't completely shit tier. I spent my summers working full time and the semesters working maybe 3-4 days a week on average (in practise working full time except taking a couple of days off before major exams).
Still, there's no fucking way I would have ended self studying all that or ever working in signal processing if I hadn't studied the topics formally in university.
Yeah I wish... I might just be a midwit but I found ECE to be particularly difficult and laborious, and occasionally very abstract. I deliberately switched out of the CompE side of the major because the PCB/ASIC design courses were required and had horrible(deserved) reputations. A major component of it was that the department prided itself on "no grade inflation" and having lots of smart research professors. This translates into most courses being graded on actual curves in that 50% of the class fails regardless of absolute score, and the lectures being completely pointless to attend (but losing points for non-attendance in a way that could only hurt you). Most learning was done in TA study halls, Professor office hours, and at home. It was essentially learn this by yourself and we'll grade you, oh and learn it better than your classmates.
I remember the average on an intro linear circuits exam (the Thevenin's equivalence topic area) being something like a 28% I had been chatting with the professor and she pretty much admitted they had went a bit overzealous with that one and actually felt bad.
It was a slog, and still to this day I feel like I suck at math.
Our circuit theory 2 course (basically passive AC circuits + laplace transform + transmission line theory) had a fail rate of around 40% ever year even though the professor was voted several times as the best teacher in the department. That topic was just legit difficult.
Then on the other side there was electronics 2 with massive and completely useless emphasis on mosfet calculations. Luckily I managed to pass that one by cheating and filling my TI-85 with all the required formulae.
I only understood perhaps a quarter of the math they taught us but the trick was to learn just enough that you could reliably pass the course (requiring typically > 50% of points in the exam) except when it came to actually useful things (iow the first semester course with all the basics required for everything else in EE).
The best thing about university was that attendance was almost never mandatory (and still isn't) with the exceptions being almost entirely the occasional lab courses.
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Jane Street's hardware desk would like a word.
?
You'll have to explain that a bit more.
High frequency traders that make the fastest lowest-latency hardware to enable their financial parasitism.
And you’re saying the people who design their hardware are self taught and didn’t go to university at all?
Yeah I know a Jump Trading hardware guy and dude has degrees coming out his ass.
And what does that sentence mean in English?
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The vast majority of attorneys I know followed the 2rafa path in undergrad and even in law school. This includes some who are now state trial court and state appellate court judges.
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No you are not, but I have a lot of acquaintances (I hesitate to call them friends) who took @2rafa's approach. As I've mentioned before I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic this sort of attitude was. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by taking challenging classes and trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of the "opportunities" presented to me.
It's interesting to look back years later and compare GPA to life-trajectory. They are not positively correlated.
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I learned even from my non-STEM classes: philosophy, international culture, debate, and more.
Maybe college is useful for most people, after all. But not the insane tuition (which doesn't seem justified), and students who don't show up and cheat because they only care about the degree: most people shouldn't attend college, like today, unless they enjoy learning or plan to use their education in some way. Then, professors could devote more time to those students, and those who wouldn't use their degrees wouldn't have debt.
I was always very attracted to the humanities and religious studies departments, but fortunately also had a very strong autodidactic education in various scientific fields. The increase in tuition costs should signal to parents and young students to spend more time charting out a sufficiently defined and pinned down career path, before blindly entering campus and assuming student debt chasing general education courses and hoping you’ll eventually find an interest in something.
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Yeah, I learned actually important things in college that are actually useful in a career. I also double majored and worked hard at studies. I wasn't lazy and high. 2rafa is being really cynical.
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Only one-fifth of bachelor's degrees and one-tenth of associate's degrees are STEM.
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