Correlation between taking a break from school and startup success?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7179

by omarish • 19 years ago

2 5 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

omarish2• 19 years ago

Startups are all about dedication/motivation. Also about creating dedication and motivation where it is necessary, when we do not care for it anymore. That explains why even when we're sick of our startups, we keep pushing onwards.

Could this mean that founders who can create motivation can also create motivation to finish at least an undergrad degree?

You guys may have noticed a common theme in my posts...

Constantine• 19 years ago

For some reason I just cant agree with you. While motivating yourself to accomplish your goals is pretty much the entire purpose of life, what makes a degree automatically one of those goals?

If college is needed to accomplish your future then by all means run headlong into it, and make the decision to enjoy every minute of it. But I think it is a mistake to confuse a college degree with the ability to motivate yourself to do what you decide you want.

BrandonM2• 19 years ago

The problem with motivation for an undergrad is when you realize that everything doesn't need to be the way it is now. Let me clarify. Most of us have been raised our whole lives with the mantra, "You have to go to college to succeed." I know that my parents didn't go to college, and they were always saying, "You don't want to end up where I am, working in a factory," etc.

The problem with that model, however, is that a standard undergraduate education is beginning to become old-fashioned and irrelevant. How many stories do you hear about students going to four years of school only to graduate and be unable to find employment? While the problem is not nearly as bad in engineering as in other fields, it's still the case that more and more people are going to college, and as a result, a degree doesn't look nearly as great as it did 20 or 30 years ago.

I personally have started to become disenfranchised with the college model in the US. As an undergrad, I have visited some undergraduate committee meetings and talked personally with a few professors, and the bureaucracy of the whole thing is somewhat disgusting. Even if a professor wants to make a change to the curriculum (for the better), he or she must endure countless meetings and votes, even for something that is clearly a good idea. It may take a year or more just to make a minor structural change in a few core courses.

Moreover, department heads are not much worried about the success (or lack thereof) of undergrads. For whatever reason, national groups that rank colleges look mainly at entrance criteria, so as long as the college can successfully lock out those students with low ACT scores (which are largely irrelevant), they look good on paper. Meanwhile, they hire new professors based only on their research and some interviews, without much regard for teaching backgrounds.

In the end, once you go off and create your own startup and work on your own projects, you start to see that college is largely not helpful to an undergrad. The stuff that is stretched out over four years could probably be learned quite easily by most in two or less, if it was all restructured a bit. College, in effect, is just another corporation, one that is in the business of paying professors and researching new ideas. It just happens that most professors do not produce enough ideas quickly enough to justify their income, so undergraduate students make up for that by paying tuition.

Once you realize that you can be successful without completing (or even starting) your undergrad, the dedication, motivation, and finances necessary to complete college just don't look like such a good trade anymore. Most courses follow a textbook, anyways, so just buy the textbook, study it yourself, talk to people online, and you will probably do just as well. The only downside is that you'll be missing that shiny piece of paper.

omarish2• 19 years ago

Nicely stated.

BrandonM2• 19 years ago

I just realized that I did leave a few things out that would be missed by not attending college. The first is that there are some interesting professors who are genuinely interested in teaching and give wonderful lectures. Secondly, some classes are structured to allow intelligent class interaction, and it can be enlightening to participate in a good discussion to see the diverse viewpoints that fellow classmates can offer. Last, but certainly not least, pg has pointed out in several writings that college is a great place to meet a co-founder. So there are a few other things that will be missed in addition to "that shiny piece of paper."

Correlation between taking a break from school and startup success?

Related Stories