I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too.
I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.)
I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper.
I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.)
I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's outcomes.
I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it.
(I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)
A few things formal institution graduates don't realize:
When you say "you're more or less paying for the piece of paper" you're taking it for granted (unless you went to a shitty school). As an Autodidact in Mathematics, programming, compsci, and psychology with nothing but a GED; you underestimate the value of rigorous environments.
Learning fast is also not the point. Learning thoroughly is the point. Thorough and rigorous learning is really fucking hard when an Autodidact. University is an environment that allusively inspires rigor. You're surrounded by peers doing the same thing you are; you have access to instructors that are (sometimes) the best in their field; and you have access to facilities (even as an alum!) that are prohibitively expensive for non-matriculating learners.
Autodidacism is hard because you have to hold yourself to extremely high standards, you have to play with your own psychology to control inspiration and perseverance (you aren't accountable to anyone!!). So even if you learn on your own now after college you still will have a number tools at your disposal that you would've had to develop on your own without college.
Yes, I learn far better on my own too, but do not discount the enormous opportunity you had by going through college.
Couldn't have said it better myself, as an autodidact of CS, math, and music, this is my thoughts.
Managing your own time and learning curve is really hard. As an autodidact, I can just not do it because I am tired, busy, not in the mood, or whatever.
The second thing that college grads don't get the value of is that they are able to learn by some proven path. This path is not etched out so well and requires considerable research, self-assessment, and decisions that aren't comfortable at all times. You could spend weeks a) researching what is next and b) attempting things you aren't ready for and blowing off a few weeks on something you gained nothing from because that knowledge base just wasn't there.
There are many other little things you learn in college that are at times quite difficult to learn about on your own. Despite the apparent "free" education, nothing is free and there are things that you simply cannot learn or discover on your own. Guidance, whether from an instructor or a mentor, is very important when you are learning. Trust me, I'd gladly shovel out money for good guidance.
You also live a lonely life and there is no one you can call up who is also struggling or trade information with.
There is no way to really test yourself so you know you are correct and where you went wrong. Self-testing is either very hard or impossible in many instances, and that little epiphany you get from a red circle isn't available for you. It takes a certain amount of brutal honesty to get it right, and then you still don't always know. This is frustrating for me.
The final piece is the double-edged sword of readiness. As a grad, you have proved to someone or some institution that you have mastered the material and are ready to work, whereas when you are an autodidact, you simply won't have the confidence to face an interviewer unless you are something like 10x better than any bachelor-holder, and sometimes masters-holder, that walks through the door. The time you lose on getting better and better -- plus the massive confidence boost -- is offset in spades by a decent education.
Email me for an beta invite at ken@understudyapp.com. This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve!
With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is live video (ala Skype) plus a whiteboard - the main surface of the iPad.
The problem in learning isn’t information access: it’s determination. It’s dead easy to put down a book or stop watching a lecture. If you’re talking to someone, you cannot just stop, and when a human asks "what have you done since last time?" you don’t want to have to say "nothing". Think of single founder vs two founder startups - someone else who cares is huge.
On the mentoring side, explaining a concept to someone else is a forcing function for getting things clear and organized for yourself. Also, it's fun to talk about stuff you chose to spend time working on and understanding, and it's fun to help someone else follow in your footsteps.
One of the reasons that autodidacts are autodidacts is because many are working $10/hr jobs and we didn't have an honest or fair shake at getting into college.
Given that, why would someone want to spend three week's salary just to download your app?
I also disagree that determination is the the problem for many autodidacts. Many of us really do enjoy the experience of learning and there is a mile of difference between slacking off and quitting. Personally, I would never pressure someone into learning that isn't into it. The Autodidact brain is not built like this.
With the iPad requirement (too poor for that + refusal to buy Apple anything and no I won't change my mind when I have enough money) and an apparent misunderstanding of who I am, I'm probably not in your target audience.
This really should be a web-based business. What is the obsession with making everything apps these days?
With that in mind, if you would like to talk to me my email is included in the public key on my profile. (You don't have to use the key if you don't want to. You can just import it and read the email address. I do that to stop spammers from finding it.)
This is solving the wrong problem (for Autodidacts, at least). Kind of no different than Khan's discussion boards, coursera's forums, and what have you.
You must realize, for a very human experience (learning and social/peer bonding around the topics) - technology is only an enabler and not whole pony show.
What's lacking is a platform for genuine collaboration and discussion on the topic of learning qua learning for people that are creating their own formal process of learning.
I have a feeling that this will manifest as a conference or weeklong retreat - rather than an app or discussion forums.
I agree wholeheartedly. As someone who has a university degree that is academic at most tangentially related to developing software (cognitive science), the way I go about educating myself and the analytical approach I take to my work is deeply rooted in my college education. I can learn a lot on my own butI know I'm much better at being an autodidact because I got a great undergraduate education and I took (most) of those four years seriously in the classroom & the library.
Undergrad level math courses are not as thorough as you might think due to the time compression needed to fit a topic into a semester. Learning fast is kind of the point. If you dive too deep you'll run out of time to get through all of the material and get poor grades.
I would argue that this is highly dependent on the University/professor who is teaching you.
I've seen courses where we're taught next to nothing in terms of thoroughness and also courses that stick us neck deep in the subject, literally going from axioms to a complete, standard mathematical framework.
Autodidactism is hard in part because you don't get access to the huge repositories of journal articles and scholarly materials that are included in the cost of your college education. I guess that counts as "facilities" but when I hear that word I think equipment.
I'm not Ixiaus but I am his best friend and co-founder (and totally going to give him hell in the office tomorrow for posting on HN when he's supposed to be on vacation. ;)
I'll write a blog post about it. It also includes a a designed curriculum, strict reading schedule, discipline in doing exercises, creativity in self evaluation, self awareness of strengths and weaknesses and tailoring the curriculum to them. I have a twenty page writing piece on my processes and philosophy that I will finalize. It appears there is a desire for it and I would love to interact with others sharing my journey!
I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
That'll work fine until the things you want to learn are not written down anywhere. Most traumatic moment of grad school: Google thesis topic and realize that no one, no where knows anything about this (*&.
Then it gets fun :) Talking with other knowledgeable people will dramatically accelerate the self-teaching process then.
Traumatic? I've written a paper (still unpublished), Googled the key words and key terms, and found that my old internet postings and arXiv copy were the only thing covering the material.
It's wonderful! I'm the only one who's fucking touched this stuff!
> I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
I've had the same experience. And I hate how colleges seem not to recognize that.
Something I realized around seven semesters too late is that most programs are conducive to independent studies, which is I'm sure a wildly broad term but at my alma mater it was basically "Go spend three months on your own learning something interesting and then write a paper or a powerpoint or a plugin on it." You'd have an advisor (or sometimes a board of advisors) to meet with you every few weeks, but the work was all entirely self-directed, sort of like a mini-honors thesis.
I imagine that those are going to become increasingly popular. If you abstract it out, its basically a credential system for productive independent thought, which is sort of the whole point.
Independent study credit is definitely worth looking into, if your college has such a possibility (most do).
However, as someone who supervises independent studies regularly, I can also say: independent studies are by far the classes most likely to result in the student just not doing anything at all, which to some extent shows why autodidacticism is not universal yet. In a traditional semester-long class with two-times-a-week meetings, it's very rare for a student to literally do nothing. Most will show up at least some of the time, and do at least some of the work. But it's easy to put off an independent study, because you have complete flexibility, and don't have to do anything this week if other things are more pressing. Then you end up 90% of the way through the semester realizing you haven't done anything.
Some very good stuff comes out of independent-study projects, but the variance is large, and it doesn't work for everyone. As a supervisor, they take a disproportionate amount of management effort, just trying to track students down and prod them into non-procrastination.
They do (usually). You can even get credit for it, at least in the US, it called CLEP - https://clep.collegeboard.org/. Cheapest year of college I ever had - was around $200.
I skipped an entire years worth of useless general ed courses to get my "requirements" to graduate out of the way at my college on 6 CLEP tests. I think the notes I took for those tests reading the wikibooks and wikipedia articles on the various topics on those tests were some of the best domain information notes I've taken. I also wrote them online, so pretty much all my K-12 notes are useless, but I gave my CLEP notes to my extended family with notes they need to read the material themselves but I did a bunch of work already.
Now you can take AP courses, or "Advanced Placement". Through my high school each test was about $80, you're graded on a scale of 1-5 which is on a percentage basis (X% of people get a 5, etc). Schools can determine what sort of credit they want to take, but general rule is 3 or higher. My college only took 5s in sciences, but it was an engineering school.
I skipped out on 26 credit hours of 140ish for the degree. It basically allowed me to change my major a year in without impacting my graduation date.
Yes, my school had AP courses as well, but only two of them. :( I think it's because my school was rural and poor. I've always been jealous of people who got to go to schools where they could take seven or eight AP courses and get a massive headstart on college.
Most of the value you can get from universities is through networking. If you don't meet anyone while you are there your degree truly is worthless. It isn't merely a matter of learning it for the sake of learning it is a matter of other people knowing that you know something or not.
Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
This. I was watching John Adams and he made an excellent quote when speaking to his son, "A scholar is made alone and sober." It's going to be my mantra for my senior year at college.
That quote basically sums up my senior year (graduated in 2012). I found that after studying enough like that and doing well as a result, other people who do the same are more willing to befriend you.
Then if either party have questions about the material, they have a fantastic outlet to ask them to. Then acing a class is really manageable.
In reference to:
I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
I would add an addendum that a good professor can significantly accelerate my learning of a subject, while a bad professor (in University, and not in high school) does not slow it down, but does not add much value.
I learned that the fastest way I'll ever learn a subject (whether or not it's a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me faster than I can teach myself.
I learned that, yes, you're more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.)
I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don't care about pieces of paper.
I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.)
I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people's outcomes.
I learned that everyone's college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it.
(I don't mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)