Ask HN: what can you learn at university that you can't self-teach?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2449205

by keiferski • 15 years ago

21 20 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

This semester, I stopped going full-time to my university and dropped to part-time status (1 class). This allows me to access most of the university resources while still giving me a ton of time to program/work on a startup.

I took a basic small business class, and unfortunately, it was a little too basic. I'm planning on going part-time in the fall, and I can't seem to find a worthy course this time around.

Seeing that it's $2500-$3000 (fees included), I'd rather not just sign up for a random class. Any suggestions? Accounting? What can I absolutely not teach myself? (Keep in mind that any course would likely have to be entry or mid-level -- I won't get into high level CS theory)

iamleo• 15 years ago

Being in accounting I can tell you that yes it would really help to have a class in it. However, I have met quite a few programmers who hated accounting. I do not know your point about going into university, what is the point of doing it period? Is it worth paying $3000 for free printing or maybe the library space?

Are you trying to be self-sufficient in everything?

keiferski2• 15 years ago

I'm not actually a programmer (I'm teaching myself how to program). I'm much more interested in business than your average programmer, so accounting might not be too boring.

The reasons for enrolling are Internet, printing, workspace, and to keep the university job I currently have. I'm not entirely sure I will be taking a course, but I'd like to investigate all the options first.

grandalf• 15 years ago

In my experience, students who do well are the ones who learn early how to self-teach.

A university can provide you with a lot of efficiencies (some faculty are extremely good at explaining things) but I don't think there's any knowledge that can't be self taught with sufficient motivation.

mikelbring• 15 years ago

Heres a good quora post on it, this is mostly related to programming:

http://www.quora.com/What-skills-do-self-taught-programmers-...

zellyn• 15 years ago

If you really like philosophy, dig into it as deeply as you can. Some really excellent programmers were philosophy majors, and benefit continually from the training in rigorous thinking and clarity of expression that studying philosophy teaches you as you get into it further.

michaelpinto2• 15 years ago

Unless you're going to a vocational school the point of an education should be to make you more well rounded as an individual. Although you may be shocked as you go through your career how important liberal arts can be — one thing that amazes me is how much writing one does as an example.

If you look at the very best entrepreneurs they're curious about everything -- be it Steve Jobs and his interest in calligraphy or Bill Gate's current interest in international medical issues. I realize that at first glance these things seem to have nothing to do with tech, but they do as tech intersects with many other fields from finance to law to social interactions (yes sociology!).

In terms of what to study you should pick a subject you have a passion for and go for that — if most teachers see that you find something to be too simple the good ones will allow you to explore most subjects in depth. And in that sense getting the right teacher is just as important as picking the right course.

keiferski2• 15 years ago

I'm actually a philosophy major, so I know how important liberal arts are. :)

I'm interested in a wide, wide variety of areas, but I feel as if this thirst is better quenched online than in a specific semester-long course. There's more and better information online than any one introductory course will have.

michaelpinto2• 15 years ago

I may be old fashioned but I think being in the same room as a good teacher and with good students seems to be much more valuable than online. Online seems to be great for learning very 2d subjects or doing fact gathering, but that stimulation tends to come from being in a room with other people (even if it's a dinner conversation or a party). Maybe the problem is that you need to go to a more engaging or specialized school? My gut tells me that your current environment isn't engaging you enough -- to me the answer to that is to find a new hood!

bennesvig• 15 years ago

"There are no uninteresting things only uninterested people." - GK Chesterton

marklabedz• 15 years ago

In addition to exposure to a wide variety of topics, learning how to attack problems from various angles or using different frameworks is incredibly useful.

thiagofm• 15 years ago

You learn how to deal with teachers that threats you like shit(and think they are good) and you also build a lot of hate to anything academic related, which can prove to be good as you won't want to be a part of the system and will give you 1000 ideas, will make you a god in execution so you will have success for sure, to not be like them.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that they give you a diploma just in case you fail as an entrepreneur -- and you won't.

The rest I think you can learn by yourself.

jeffepp• 15 years ago

The best learning you can do at a University is learning about yourself and being on your own (for most people this is the first time they have freedom from their parents).

It's also a chance to meet people different from your high school, which in many areas, are rather homogeneous.

All of these things can be learned after college, however, the learning curve is much steeper...

Finally, I don't know many people who say "I wish I dropped out of college and started a business" although I know I would give my left arm to live as an undergrad for another semester

asymptotic• 15 years ago

I studied Electrical Engineering at university. I have an enduring memory of sitting outside at a restaurant, on a beautiful day, with my roommate, who was a political science major. At one point he started pulling out his notes and an essay and wanted my thoughts, and we spent the next hour discussing various minutae of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another memory that vividly stands out is being at a friend's house party one evening. One guy, a arts major from Argentina, for some reason made what seemed like the best tasting beer in the world in a red bucket, and we talked for a while about how he managed to make it. Afterwards he displayed an unusual, tenacious, and passionate interest in alternating-current (AC) and as I started breaking down the basic physics and EE behind it a larger and larger group of people gathered around to pester me with questions.

I love computers man but not everything is online. That's why you should go to university. Like jeffepp said, I state without qualification that my undergrad was the best time of my life.

gcb• 15 years ago

How to negotiate deadlines with professors.

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abbasmehdi• 15 years ago

Anything technical and application based can be learnt without. In my personal experience the best courses were the ones that looked beneath the surface, that answered "why" not "how"; so I would suggest only humanities and liberal arts. Take philosophy, sociology, anthropology, those can be almost life changing. Unless you're researching under a like-minded professor, studying anything technical at the undergraduate level is a waste of time because you can do that on your own. One exception: if you want access to the particle accelerator you might have to be registered in the physics department.

I want to add I am quite impressed by your sensibility.

troymc• 15 years ago

I suspect it would be extremely difficult to self-teach yourself to become a board-certified brain surgeon. University is definitely the best route if that's your career goal.

rcon85• 15 years ago

I'd say it's more dependent upon the faculty and students you learn from/with than the subject you're studying. Your classes could be led by lazy, incompetent instructors and filled with dull students who are all just looking for "job security and decent benefits" (barf). On the other hand, there's a chance you could meet your future business partner while being taught by an inspiring professor.

Every class is a gamble unless there's some reliable evaluation system available. But if you think students are actually capable of rating teachers in any meaningful way, think again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect

Also: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_h...

_delirium• 15 years ago

I could see two directions:

1. A seminar-type class where interaction with other students and a (good) faculty member is important. I've had some good philosophy classes that I felt were hard to replicate outside a university, and an AI class that was like that as well. Self-teaching the material is possible, but it's relatively difficult to find a good back-and-forth with a genuine expert outside a class imo, because most experts, even those willing to debate on the internet and so on, aren't that willing to spend a lot of time engaging with complete beginners who are unfamiliar with the standard arguments in an area.

2. Something foundational that you could self-teach but, due to the willpower involved for something without immediate practical use, in all honesty most of us probably won't. Something like a good statistics course, discrete mathematics, theory of computation, computer architecture, etc.

If there's some way to get feedback from existing students on which courses are good, that might be more important than the specific subject matter; whether an intro-X course is a win over just reading the introductory textbook on X varies a lot.

hackerblues• 15 years ago

The aspect of university which can be replicated in self study is the aquisition of knowledge from a source. Regardless of the source, your professor saying "Display text in Python with the 'print' command." or you reading it in a book, you will need to put in the same mental effort to learn it. This process is the core aspect of education.

What university provides is a number of side things which assist in this process.

1. An expert in the field who can advise you from experience what information is important, where the best information sources are, and in which order to approach things.

2. Feedback on how well you understand the material via discussion groups, assignments and examinations.

3. The opportunity to ask questions about the material.

These sound cliched but they are really important. The alternative is a person who is doing something in an inefficient way because they don't know the better way, they don't even know that there is a better way, and the answers they are producing are incorrect because they are blindly applying the inefficient method when it doesn't work in this case.

University also provides access to credentials through grades and letters of recommendation, a network of peers who will likely end up in a similar industry to you, and various social/clubs things.

My advice would be to pick courses with these advantages in mind.

- Do I know how I would learn this field? Maybe the topic is so large or new that there is no standard text and you will need a guide.

- Could I obtain easy feedback if I self-studied? You can check arithmetic on a calculator but it's harder to look at a piece of your writing and know if you are improving and what needs correction.

- Do I want to build connections with this industry? Selling software to engineers might be easier if you know something about the domain, and know some engineers who can vouch for you and tell you what problems they have.

bendmorris• 15 years ago

There's absolutely no field of knowledge that you couldn't teach yourself about. The benefits of a university have nothing to do with being a monopoly on knowledge, because nowadays such a thing doesn't exist. The benefits, in my opinion, include:

1. Credentialing. I believe this is the number one reason people go to college today. Not to learn, but to obtain a degree that proves some indefinable quality about yourself - that you have a certain level of competence, are persistent, etc. I've heard it described as a "social signalling ritual."

2. Mentorship. If you work closely with a good professor, you can get a lot out of it. I'm a member of a research lab and have weekly meetings with my advisor; these meetings usually devolve to picking his brain for career advice. Also, when you self-teach, it's harder to know when you're wrong than when you have someone to tell you.

3. Perseverance. 4 years can be a hell of a long time.

Of course, no one actually signs up for a "random class" - you're not throwing darts at a course catalog or anything. If you're really interested in something, take a class in it. That's the only way to figure out which classes are worth taking and which ones aren't. I will, however, point you to this pg essay on which subjects are worth studying [1] that I really enjoyed. My favorite part: "Yes, of course, you'll learn something by taking a psychology class. The point is, you'll learn more by taking a class in another department."

One last thing: look through the list of departments. Look at and consider every department before you decide which one you want to spend time in. As a Biology student, looking back, I think Biological Engineering would've been a lot cooler to study, but now I'm not in a position to switch.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html

Ask HN: what can you learn at university that you can't self-teach?

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