Ask HN: How do you balance college and a startup?

I was in EE, and in short, you can't. At my university, CS people had about 20 hours of classes a week. EE people were pushing 40's. It becomes next to impossible to give the focus required to do anything big. My advice would be to get something going during the breaks, and do maintenance during the rest of the term. Or you can drop out like I did if you're really driven and have options or the ability to create options.

There were people who dabbled in startup ideas, but any of my serious colleagues (i.e. the guy who started Kik) all dropped out/took a year off and never went back.

Disregard everything else that is draining your energy. Mind you studies and start-up but keep away from all other college activities except couple of them that help you unwind or give you the support you need. After you do this, you should be just fine really!

Abshir

Its really simple as time management. Do 1 task per day/every other day for your startup (maybe 1-3 hours if you can spare) and at the end of 1 month, check your progress. Rinse and Repeat until launch. Then do the same with marketing.

Focus on what needs to get done.

Do you have a cofounder? Having another person there to push you and make you feel obligated to put in time even when you're swamped with school assignments is crucial. When one of my cofounders and I were working on our startup during senior year of college, we basically treated it like heavy-workload class - we scheduled set hours to get together and work every day or every other day. I didn't want to disappoint my cofounder, so I found time to work on our startup even when PSets and programming assignments were due the next day.

It really depends on the University and major. If you're at a university that requires very little work, then you can get by. But if you're at a famously difficult major at a famously difficult university, you can't.

A lot of the more engineering focused universities (MIT, Caltech, CMU) can easily push their students to 80 hours of work a week without the blink of an eye. It's not unheard of the more difficult classes to take 60 hours a week by itself.

At any rate, good luck. I've been desperately trying to balance a startup myself with school :). However, Christmas break (now) is the real furious coding sprint.

focus

chances are you go to school for 4-6 hours a day at most. Then you have homework etc for another 3-4 hours(hardly). That still leaves you with 7-8 hours a day to work on your startup.

And once you finish coding, there is really no requirement to work 24/7...sure it helps...but chances are early on you'll do X, then wait a week to see the impact...because you just don't have enough traffic to split test with

Worry about learning instead of your grades. You can get C's and still gain the knowledge you need for your startup. It will cut down significantly on the amount of hours you need to devote to school.

This is going to get down-voted, but with that dual major, why are you trying to run a start-up at the same time?

just do it

I'm in the same boat, mate. I'm a Junior majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. Lately, I've been getting more and more frustrated at my complete lack of time that I can devote to doing what I actually care about: starting up TextMate and programming.

I've thought about a few options and to be honest, I still don't know what I plan on doing. But it's cathartic for me to think like this.

The way I see it I have a few options. Note that all require some sort of sacrifice:

1. School requires a lot of time because that's the time that's required to achieve high grades. It's not easy to get an A in a course and that often comes with doing a lot of work and assignments. Yet, it's still possible for you to learn what you actually needed to learn from the course while not doing every little tedious exercise. That frees up time.

Example: Last quarter, I had this really awful EE class. I understood the basics of the course, as evidenced by my midterm/final grades (both were 91%, some 20% above class average), yet I didn't bother to do most of the homework. That was 20% of my grade and I got a C+ rather than an A because of it. That's the sacrifice...but on the flip-side, I got a solid headstart on a personal project that I'm really excited to work on.

Second example: There's a little story out there about Zuckerburg when he was creating Facebook. He allegedly had stopped going to class or focusing on his school-work when Facebook started taking off.

2. Consider doing a major besides EE/CS if you already know how to program. That frees up your time and you could easily get work done on your startup on the side with an English or Economics degree.

3. Admit that you can't focus on a startup and get great grades at the same time. Tough-it-out for a few years and start thinking about startups once you graduate. Do things like have a life and having fun now.

4. Consider starting something with a few co-founders to alleviate some of the required invested time.

5. Think small. Don't think of a huge time-consuming idea. You don't have time for that AND getting good grades.

I'd love to talk more. Email's in my profile if you're interested.

  * you don't feel like doing homework
  * you don't feel like going to sleep early
  * partying on Saturdays is enough for you
  * all the good parties are on Saturday anyway.
  * you want to feel productive

Might want to ask Marc Held of Zazu (http://www.getzazu.com/). He's around... Marc? You there? :)

I managed rather badly[1] -- my grades weren't as high as I'd have liked (not that it matters much, I guess). The light was being three classes away from graduation and being able to finish up college part time, remotely. I can't say that I would recommend doing it to anyone else.

I started the semester off with 5 classes (3 art studio classes, one art non-studio and one CS class). I ended up dropping one studio art class and all but ignoring another for most of the semester.

1. In addition to working and class, there was a period where I was in 6 different cities in 8 different Thursday morning/Friday-to-Sunday night/Monday-morning weekends; Rochester (College), NYC (Home), Chicago (Conference), Washington DC (Stewart/Colbert rally), Providence (looking at a college for grad school) and San Francisco (Work + apartment hunting). This traveling didn't exactly help my focus either.

I am in the same situation.

I'm a Junior majoring in Computer Science and I have several side projects that I have been trying to finish up. However, school work takes up a majority of my time so I rely mostly on my winter/summer break to get the bulk of my personal projects completed.

You might suggest I code on the weekends but that is not a possibility as a majority of the time I have so much homework that I need to dedicate weekends to completing the assignments.

Get grades good enough to keep you in college. Then eliminate all nonsense: partying, extra-curricular activities, recreational sports, etc. and go all-out on your startup, as if you were studying part-time and running a startup full-time.I'm also a junior running a start-up, and I make it a point to dedicate 32-40 hours a week regardless of exams, vacations, etc.

I'm a sophomore in college working on a startup with two other people (one a junior at my school, one who recently graduated), and our model is to work all day every Saturday. We meet up around 10am and code until 7pm or so. I get all of my school work done during the week and on Sunday, and still have time to go out on Saturday night. It can be tough saying no to activities scheduled for Saturday, but this model is definitely the best for my situation.

Don't. Do one thing and do it well.

If your startup is racing against another company toward a release date, you're going to lose if you can't focus on it 100%. If not, put the startup on hold until you finish school.

Have a good understanding of what you want to accomplish with everything you're doing. Have a point. And realize that to do better in one thing, you'll necessarily do worse in the other. And that's OK.

I started RateMyStudentRental as a junior studying Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. I'll just say that I always knew what score I needed on the upcoming test to maintain my minimum desired grade in the class.

I took a gap year so I could work on my start-up first. You can't do a start0up part-time. Like you can't have babies and be part time with them.

But with dual majors it's going to be even tough for you. Just wondering that if you had to do a start-up, why did you take dual major? And if you had to take dual major - why a startup?

If I were in your shoes I'd at least drop one of those. One of these subject is enough to keep you on your toes anyways. Let alone doing both and then a start-up too. It's better to feel a little bit bad about dropping something now than face failure at all three fronts.

It's time you prioritize. What can you do and forget that you had to even eat? That's how I know what I am passionate about and I know I won't mind doing it even if no results are coming. And that's the calling you should go toward, IMO.

Here are a few strategies to get by:

1. Double-count your startup as coursework. Enroll only in project-based classes. Spin off each module in your startup as a project -- e.g. Distributed Systems? Write the EC2 part. Databases? Write the Lucene part.

2. Many EE/CS departments offer bschool classes at the 400/500/700 levels. Use these to get startup advice / stay motivated.

3. Take research credits, have entrepreneurship-friendly faculty guide you through the research parts of your startup.

4. Take a semester off, work on things, come back. You'll miss out on social life, but that's a tradeoff you're making.

5. Concentrate your startup work towards the beginning of the semester, switch to coursework at the end.

6. Be hyper-vigilant about course-performance. Since you're technically constantly slacking off, you will often need to perform disaster recovery; e.g. shoot for extra credit, to make up for a midterm you didnt study for, etc.

I dropped out. It worked out ok for me. (I would have been more likely to try to stick around if I could have afforded tuition, but in retrospect, I wish I'd dropped out a year or two earlier and moved directly to Silicon Valley to work on startups there).

I am a pharmacy student in a top university in the UK, so the workload is pretty daunting. I take time to focus on my books and run my websites. I use the holiday period to build websites and during school period, read my book and run the websites (not build). This method works really well for me.

I was in your situation about 8 years ago. I probably made all the mistakes one can make and hopefully this will help you. Here's a few tips:

- Eat well and exercise 5 days a week. You'll probably think you're too busy for this, but IT HAS TO COME FIRST. It will help you focus and be more productive for school and the startup.

- Have a social life. Entertainment fuels creativity and productivity.

- Don't work ridiculous hours. That was probably my biggest mistake. I thought I was Superman and that I could work 9-2/3am, 7 days a week. That's about ~125 hours a week (including school of course).

It worked out for a while, but I then became extremely tired. People told me I looked like a zombie. I obviously had no social life and had stopped exercising.

The problem with this lifestyle is that it is counter-productive. It works at first, but then you become so exhausted that the more you work, the less productive you are. And the less productive you get, the more frustrated you become and you feel the need to put in even more hours.

Don't get into this vicious circle. It'll kill you. Trust me on this, been there, done that. I burnt out. Don't let it happen to you because it will take you YEARS to recover.

I think the smart way to do it is to plan your weeks properly. Schedule time off to go to the gym, see friends, etc. Schedule work hours and have at least scheduled 1 day off every two weeks. Stick to your schedule. Don't let yourself work ridiculous hours or slack off. Balance is key. It should pay off in the long run.

Focus on finishing you degree, then do your startup. Statistically, your startup is highly likely to fail, so don't let it screw up your degree.