Ask HN: What to do for college?

Good luck with this.

The whole article is great.

"If a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they'd just get into an ideological argument. 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."

I think that's a great test, and I agree about the Entrepreneur program. If it wouldn't amaze and impress somebody from 100 years ago, it's probably not very valuable. You can learn enough about it on your own.

Right now I am on an Economics/Legal Studies track. Originally I was doing Finance, thinking that I was going to be a Wall Street hot shot some day. Then I interned out in NY... Immediately dropped the Finance major and switched paths.

You can learn a lot at the University level, but you really need to want to. Don't waste your time taking shitty Rocks For Jocks classes.

Enroll in classes that benefit you. I.e. a public speaking course, an accounting course, etc. College is a time to find yourself and who you really are. It is a time to carve out your life's path. A time to learn how to think (logic) and how to work under pressure.

Good luck and most importantly follow your heart's desire.

Another piece of advice would be to not only choose subjects you're interested in but also the specific classes and professors in those subjects.

Do something that will afford you plenty of lateral freedom (so you can take that calligraphy course a la http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc#t=4m28s) but that will give you some skill you can make money with on the other side.

If grad school is your goal (you didn't indicate so I'm only guessing) then a purely theoretical degree is fine; you'll satisfy your intellectual curiosity while demonstrating that you have the chops for higher level thinking. Otherwise, please please get a degree in something more specific.

The business of designing your own degree makes me nervous. On the one hand you can use it to show you had the industry to do something off the beaten path. On the other hand it's this thing no one can easily relate to. If I tell you I have a degree in Economics you understand what that means (that I'm no economist is besides the point!). But it comes with certain expectations about the materials I studied and the manner in which I was trained to think/solve problems. That signaling goes a long way with employers and/or clients and you might pay a price if you get too creative.

Also you never, ever know where life circumstances will take you. Best not to get a chip on your shoulder. Not saying that you have, just saying that I've seen it happen; we entrepreneurs get it in our heads that "none of this matters... I'm starting my own company when I graduate." You might be 100% right, but best to find out when you get there.

One final thing: Don't take anything I've said too literally. A year in the Business major doldrums got me overly concerned with doing something more pragmatic (again, I think this is only natural of we entrepreneurs) so I added Economics to my CV and rushed my schooling to finish a year early. Looking back that was so foolish... I should have lightened my course load and finished on time with my buddies. That would have given me plenty of opportunity to explore more interesting classes (like softer stuff in communications and theater) while using the extra time to get my business off the ground. You know what they say about hindsight.

Good luck either way. You sound like you have a good head on your shoulders so I'm confident things will work out for you.

e.x. in my introductory class to digital logic, we learned about the history of logic on the sidelines.

Now, if they have a History of Business, that is very clearly relevant to your interests- go ahead and take that.

Get a degree with something practical underlying. I wish I had done econ as a second major, or minor. But more for purely intellectual reasons (what financial motivations cause people to do things). Your major is really 60 ( i think, its been a while) of your 120 credits, in some cases its even less.

So use your 20-30 remaining courses wisely. This whole idea of telling people you majored in something imaginary will honestly make you look more like a smug a-hole for years to come than clever, and people won't take you as seriously as you are taking yourself. think about how this sounds "I majored in life studies".

However I highly recommend working on your communication skills, take lots of classes where you have to write analytical papers on a variety of subjects. The greatest businessmen are also great communicators. They know how to convey their pitch and turn it into sales.

take a media studies course or two, take an intro to marketing course, take commercial law (one of my fav courses), take an international business class, and before you realize it you've just knocked out a minor in business/commerce.

Math wise, talk to an advisor in that department, your goal seems to fall under 2 courses: statistics, and financial math. both very useful. Calculus and higher may not really solve your issue.

History wise, you're on track here to understand human nature, and likely sharpen your paper writing skills here.

don't forget to take a science course or two, even if they aren't complicated/hard science classes, you want to avoid a narrow-focus and expose yourself to great minds all over.

you might also think about taking an introductory Computer Science or engineering class. I wish I had taken more of these as well.

One of the key things you're going to need is a good advisor or multiple advisors. Most advisors in college don't care about your track, they are just forced to help you, and have a huge volume of students to deal with. Here is an insider tip (both my parents are college profs): look through the course lists, find ones that interest you, and look up the teacher's email. Shoot them an email, tell them you'd like to pick their brain, and want some advice on their field. See if they are free, and if you can come by their office hours. People LOVE to think others find them interesting. Before you know it you'll have a handful of advisors, many whom could help you in your business pursuits as well.

so in conclusion, get a real major as its going to help you be more marketable to others (think people investing in YOU, long term). Take a bunch of interesting classes, don't be afraid to take a class in another department (just ask, they'll let you in), and if you plan correctly, you can probably knock out a bunch of minors w/overlapping courses.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676242

Are quite helpful as well.

Good luck!

Get a real major. One endorsed by a department and whose name everyone understands. Do not invent the name of your major. A major is a brand. (Believe me: It need not have anything to do with your future career, let alone what you actually do in your own time.)

When I say that I have a degree in "Physics" people know for a fact that I have formal training in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, that I have enough math background to navigate Maxwell's equations, and that I've probably seen an oscilloscope before. If my degree were in "Computational Physical Sciences" they would harbor doubts. They would be justifiably suspicious that I was bullshitting them, that I had dodged around grabbing easy electives and had never done any heavy lifting.

You only have to spend so much of your time taking courses in your major, so get one and finish it. Indulge your whims with electives -- go ahead and spread those around; it is good that you want to do that.

As for what to study, I'll adopt my usual advising tactic and tell you to study something hard. Your major is your brand; let your brand be "interesting, hardworking, and smart". Sciences and math are hard. Statistics, mathematics, accounting, economics. Biology, chemistry, physics. Electronics. Mechanical engineering. Linguistics. Dare I say it: Computer science. Philosophy is actually pretty good. Music can be pretty good -- both technical and artistic; takes a lot of hard work and determination; a good way to practice communication and get over your stage fright. Things that make you read and write a lot are very good -- I minored in history, it was great -- but do not major in "communication" (though if there's an elective lab course that lets you run pro-level audio and video equipment, that would be great fun) and do not waste time studying creative writing in college.

(You really can't learn to write like Roald Dahl by taking a course. Very few of the great writers ever formally studied writing, and Dahl appears to be no exception. Great creative writing is mostly about practice -- you must read a lot, and you must write a lot -- and you can get that without paying tuition, though it certainly does take time. Just go read Stephen King's On Writing, and/or the essays and forums on Wordplayer.com:

http://www.wordplayer.com/

and/or Learn Writing with Uncle Jim:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710

and save the tuition money for something else, something you can't get on your own.)

Lab courses, for god's sake: Take the opportunity to get your hands on every piece of expensive equipment that your school owns, be it a piano, an electronics lab, or a machine shop.

Also, it turns out English is a waste of a major--while there are English majors who are good writers, you'll run into just as many, if not more good writers in college who are not English majors--and plenty of English majors who are very poor writers indeed. If you want to work on your writing chops, find writing intensive courses in history and philosophy. (Studying literature doesn't teach you a think about how to write literature, it teaches you how to criticize literature.)

On the quantitative side, you want statistics more than you want to worry about other types of math. How much can we infer from how much data? How do you set up an experiment to collect valid data? Is a difference of x really a difference? You're completely at sea unless you can answer those questions. You can easily be a huge success in business and in life without understanding calculus. Being poor with statistics will make things much more difficult.

Finally, business classes vary by quality--classes like accounting which correspond with an actual set of skills are sometimes worthwhile, but some business subjects aren't worth taking classes in (MIS, management) and others (marketing) lie somewhere in between.

[1] It turns out that if you misunderstand Hegel, you still have a potentially interesting set of philosophical ideas to work with, even if they're different from the ideas Hegel was trying to convey. So it's no impact to a philosopher's stature to write unclearly, just an impediment to one's original intent being understood.

I'd also suggest a good creative writing course (I'd pick prose over poetry, but they're your classes now); the workshopping process did a lot for me as far as developing a critical eye toward language. One could only hope that it would do the same for you.

personally, i maintain that nearly anyone who is sufficiently motivated to learn math can do so. my wife is a perfect example, if you would have asked her last year which subject she hated the most, it would have been math. she was re-taking some lower level algebra course at a community college, which she'd previously gotten a D in, and she was committed to taking the minimum number of math courses required to transfer to a california state school. however, i told her she could get her university of california education paid for, and the particular school she wanted to go to required calculus for her major, so she reluctantly took the plunge.

a year later, math is her favorite subject. she's gotten A's in all of her math coursework for the past year, including her first calculus class over this last summer. she's currently taking calculus II, and doing well in it, now.

i can't tell you how many doors this has opened for her. she was initially a psychology major, but she's considering going to economics (which is very math heavy, requiring the typical 5-semester engineering math track: calc I-III, linear algebra, and differential equations) now instead. who knows where she'll end up, but the process has been extremely rewarding in that a) she was a total math phobic before and her confidence has undergone a complete transformation in the last year, b) math really teaches you to organize your thinking and think "clearly" in the same way you viewed philosophy as doing (math and philosophy are actually quite closely related), and c) as previously mentioned, she can do anything she wants to in school now.

and, actually, having taught math at a community college myself for a couple years i can say that i've seen this story repeated over and over again. nearly all my algebra students went on to calculus afterwards, and i'd see many of the students in my algebra classes do very well in my calculus classes later on. probably the most rewarding thing is when someone would come to me years later and thank me for helping them get good at math because it opened up __________ opportunity for them later. my default response was, "hey, you did all the work...!".

so, why all this talk about math? the reason is that most of the articles i've seen regarding job satisfaction by major have one thing in common: a lot of the "most" rewarding/fulfilling/lucrative/useful jobs are math-related.

is this to say that you'll be miserable if you just get the basic analytical requirements out of the way and never take another math class again past stats? no. but i've personally found that having been a math major (and now back in grad school for computer science) that it's always rewarding when something math-y comes up to be able to confidently tackle and competently solve problems. in other words, kick its butt.

most of the time it turns into a puzzle or a game of sorts, rather than a chore. personally, my flexibility and competency with math has led to many different and extremely interesting options for me. i've done work in anything from biophysics/chem to bioinformatics, to writing economic forecasting/analysis software, to what i'm currently doing, which is solving computer vision problems.

i hated math in high school. i only really got interested in it at a community college as a result of a couple of inspiring professors, and i ended up at one of the top math programs is the country. in high school, i'd never have guessed that would've happened.

bottom line is that i've never regretted learning to excel at math. if you have the time and inclination, it might be something to consider. then, after you get that and your GE's out of the way, you can revisit this question again.

...

"He ... believed a competent person primarily has the ability to take things from one field of knowledge and apply them to others in creative ways." Well, he's right. But you have to have the information to work with.

By the way, lot of philosophy majors discover that they don't want to be in academia (or do, but can't get tenure) and that computing not only requires an ability for abstract thinking but rewards it well.

If it is just for the contacts and a piece of paper just do a the shortest business or engineering course you can and do it online via something like Open University so that you can focus on building some business ideas or working for a startup. Try get an internship or voluntarily role at Google or Facebook, Twitter etc - what you will learn there and the contacts you will get will be invaluable, even if you work on the business rather than technical side.

3-5 years of college and grad school will be an absolute waste of time for you. You don't actually learn anything in college of use, you hopefully just learn how to learn but you can do this on your own time for cheaper. Also the contacts but there are better ways of getting a good network together. When I hire or interview someone I only look at their experience, especially any side and personal projects they have, I relay don't care what they studied or what college they went to. MBA's are even more of a waste of time and money

Just don't do a finance course and become a banker: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/turning-bankers-to-engine...