We need an AirBNB for Mentorship--not $35k a year wasted on college (launch.is)
anyone out there want to build mentormykid.com? dead serious... I will fund it. :-)
i meet young adults all day long who are $100-200k in debt after school. makes no sense.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadhttp://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns
They could use a SquareSpace site...
Also, NY Tech Meetup is doing a Startup Summer program where we get high school students into internships at tech startups: http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-s...
Programs like these that are supplemental to the general education kids will be getting in middle, high-school, and college are necessary, but they would never be able to replicate everything that a young person needs to learn in order to survive.
There are many ways to make education better, lets try to have systems that support each other.
Jason, want to donate to the MicroIntern program? :-)
My motivation, as may be yours, is to disrupt this current increasingly flawed education system in whatever way I can. Working on a few other projects along this line at the moment...
But yes, mentors outside (as well as inside, perhaps?) of academic institutions is a rather good idea, i think :-)
Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that "some kid gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich... waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a stain wouldn't come off.
Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers
In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work.
While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.
One thing that is particularly noticeable in private schools is that the emphasis is not purely on academic performance (although that is important) - they are excellent in providing a very rounded education.
My only regret is that the same level of education is not available to all children - regardless of the parents ability to pay (which is obviously the main selection criteria at the moment).
Structure it exactly like a kitchen in the fine dining world. Young commis chefs start with learning products and techniques by doing the low-level prep work. After that's mastered, they graduate to garde-manger where they generally are in charge of cold apps, soups and sometimes more. Not only does this expand their technique repertoire and palate but it introduces the concept of being responsible for your dishes, with no excuses. This continues around every station, with the cook learning more and being responsible for more as they continue.
While this is hard to reproduce exactly in a tech startup, it certainly wouldn't be hard to take on an apprentice who starts at the bottom and learns the basics under the mentorship of a more experienced developer while learning more and taking more on.
I feel like either could be argued, but I'm in total agreement about this learning style.
If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still.
In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards.
While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week.
What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.
I had an apprenticeship between the ages of 15 and 18, at an ad agency that was using the newfangled computers to move faster than their competition. I was bored with high school and my neighbor's son owned the company. He liked to hire kids and teach them to program. I learned a lot, and got school credit even while almost-not-quite dropping out because of my school's voc-tech program.
It was a great experience, and I hope to set up something like that in the future.
At the time I wanted to be an illustrator and calligrapher, if you can believe that. Half of the day I spent managing the phone book library. We had a subscription to every book in North America, something like 8,000 volumes.
The other half I spent more or less dicking around, doing creatives for the ads, special projects for sales, tinkering with layouts, reading manuals, and teaching myself about design theory and how to use the whole Adobe suite.
We were paid minimum wage for 25 hours a week, so I don't think us kids were a huge burden on the business. And we all turned in useful work. My high school had a program that gave us school credit for working, as long as we took core classes and stayed employed.
It was a fantastic experience, and every job I've held has come to me in some way through contacts I made through that program. Plus, it was extremely valuable to come back after a co-op and connect what you were learning with the real world.
How about an online mentoring matchup where:
- Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with.
- Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.
The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors.
I also tend to disagree on the notion of 35K a year wasted on college. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends.
Edit: Corrected grammar.
I guess I did it wrong. The only friends I have from college are the same ones I had before college. I have a few facebook acquaintances too, but it would be a stretch to call them friends.
I had friends in classes, and we'd hang out sometimes, but this notion of 'lifelong friends made in college' just doesn't seem to feel very real. It also doesn't seem to be the case for many of the people I know. Yes, they made friends in college, but for the most part those friendships have about the same impact as high school friends - typically, not much after you leave the shared space.
But perhaps I'm just too cynical...
Same boat here. I worked year-round to put myself through state school, and lived at home (20 miles off campus). I had few peers in my CS program, most others had only casual interest. My friends who went to Berkeley made life-long friends by living in dorms and playing sports with fellow nerds.
I'd almost say that the network itself is worth the price I paid for college. Just looking at the people I know, I can probably connect myself to someone in any of the top 20 US schools in one or two degrees of separation. I assume this is how things like banking and executive networks are built, although that's not my field.
If you want, put your kid up in an apartment, do tons of networking in/out of their field of interest /and mentorship. Then let them figure out what to do after: be it a company, job or college.
College is one way of making great connections, but it's a really expensive way!
I also would contend, as studies show, that most Uni students come out without an appreciable increase in skills - compared with mentor/protege I think this underperforms society.
Programming I've taught myself, in general. =)
* I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so.
* Interns at my company get paid, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship.
I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools".
edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive.
My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.
Given your TCC, I assume you meant $20K.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784
To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots."
That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering nowadays.
The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means nothing.
"If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I don’t care what she did there."
... um, yeah, right.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734
It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college education and not ending up with marketable skills.
A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default.
If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article) suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.
Colleges don't care what you major in, as long as the dollars flow. Colleges have absolutely no incentive to provide educational experiences that are useful in the working world, since the money is already in the bank account. They have every incentive to maximize enrollments [1] and keep students enrolled as long as possible, while reducing costs via cheap graduate student labor.
Colleges also have every incentive to massage outcomes statistics to keep federal dollars flowing. When a student defaults on a loan, the college doesn't bear the brunt of the impact - it's the responsibility of the government, and therefore, the taxpayer.
"Fixing" the college system, as you suggest, would require eliminating many administrators and/or substantially reducing their salaries, structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts), and largely eliminating federal subsidies for academic research, student loans, and grants.
You can bet that every single individual involved in credentialing as it presently exists will fight those changes to their dying breath. Since being "strong on education" gets politicians elected, this faction will find it easy to maintain political support.
Personally, I think this sentiment sums up the alternative approach:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
Employers don't NEED people with college educations. They need employees with economically valuable skills. They're not the same thing.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b41770642...
This sort of view is rampant on HN, and I can kind of see why. The core mental skills engendered by a truly study in the liberal arts, users here pick up on their own. The more technical skills were either self-taught or learned in a technical educational program. And finally, many of you probably knew from a somewhat early age, at least college, that you wanted to do the sort of technical fields often discussed here. I don't think it's a false assumption to say that many users, probably like yourself, are "smarter," by some core measurement of reasoning and reading and writing, than the general populace. It's easy to see why you should brush away something like the liberal arts--it didn't do anything for you!
Yet this ridiculous shortsightedness reminds me of recurring clarion calls about the end of religion. "Any second now, it will no longer become necessary. It's been central to (spirituality and life/education) for, literally, thousands of years, but THIS is the year we stop needing it."
Even if we eliminate the huge debt that (Western) intellectualism owes to the liberal arts of classical era, reasons abound for continuing the tradition beyond mere duty.
Before I continue, let me clarify what I mean by liberal arts. A degree in anything from a large public university is probably not a true liberal arts education. The liberal arts, to me, implies small classrooms, the Socratic method, great/classic literature, heavy reading assignments and papers, emphasis on reasoning and essay writing as opposed to memorization and test-taking, and faculty that take an active approach to students' lives, engaging them after hours.
That sort of education, to me, is worth what I'm (currently) paying for it. I admit, the financial aid/tuition is in dire need of restructuring. The athletic departments and non-faculty employees are, more often than not, unneeded at their current levels.
It is absolute folly to throw out the system that has worked nearly as long as civilization itself because the "market" demands different skills. I am all for changing departments to fit market skills, but we must remember:
Departments can only change so fast, and sometimes the best way to learn those skills it simply by trying them, and not by learning about old models of them. I frequent this place enough to know that CS degrees are not necessarily the best way to make your living in programming. Though I offer no personal anecdote, one sentiment I come across is, they're simply outdated, and move too slow. YET, a department shifted to fit "market demands" might simply expand the CS department, despite the department's inability to quickly adjust to market demands. We must realize that there is a limit to how "new" an education can be. I trust the market to certain tasks, but not to determining what is most useful to study.
That, in itself, presents an argument for the liberal arts. Technical skills change. Homer does not. Four years spent studying a now-dead skills are wasted years. Four years spent reading the Odyssey in Greek will almost certainly not grant any useful skills, but it will sharpen the mind far greater than any program shifted to meet "market demands."
My greatest personal support for the liberal arts comes from long hours spent studying a single endeavor. I would think this is a universal feeling: time spent pouring over a subject or work or project should be rewarding. The more time I spent last semester delving into the Aeneid, the more rewarding and revealing it became. I have never felt this way about any subject, and certainly not ones adjusted to meet "market demands." I'll be damned if I devote four years to something unimportant.
We can wax eloquent about useful skills, or we can draw a sharp contrast between needing to learn specific skills for a job, and needing to learn to learn, to "think outside the box," however cliche that may sound, to analyze arguments, and trends, and people, and events, to questio...
Government guarantees of loans are always a recipe for moral hazard and inefficiency. Look at housing.
Either the government should directly fund higher education, as in Canada, Australia and other countries, or it should end guarantees on education loans from the private sector, so that they can have a more effective market. I'd be fine with the government subsidizing loan rates (say, paying the first 3% of the interest rate.) But the overall rate should be determined by market forces and the risk that a student will not earn enough to pay back their loans.
Borrowing 100K to learn basket-weaving should not have the same implicit risk as borrowing 100K to learn software development. As long as there is, you're effectively subsidizing the basket weaving at everyone else's expense.
Also, the solution suggested by the OP doesn't scale. There aren't remotely enough available internship opportunities to handle the demand if a large percentage of college students went this route, nor would big companies want to spend their time attempting to filter what would essentially be high school graduates looking to work in the corporate space.
Sadly, most of the "value" of college today is due to the failure of high schools. If you require a basic level of literacy, numeracy, computer literacy, etc. you have to set your level at college graduates, since a HS diploma no longer guarantees such skills.
The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application.
Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).
Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12 months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required internships).
"Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that."
To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume.
I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training.
We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all.
This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.
Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.
There are other ways to help people from outside the "circle" break in, this in fact the genesis of most diversity programs at white-shoe firms.
Here's an argument to think about: The "college bubble" argument is not about college itself, it is about the new American cultural view of college (a social experience and just another hoop to jump through) and the American portrait of success (fortune and fame). Why hold colleges responsible for the changing values of its people?
(I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during school, full-time during breaks)
Also, I was mandated to do an internship that related to my major (paid or unpaid) for at least one semester, so I presume some other people are in the same boat.
* Coop is usually paid * It's usually technical. * Some universities have programs to support coops.
The biggest coop program is from the University of Waterloo. All engineering students are required to take part in the program which combines work and school by alternating between a school semester and work semester. The university has it's own job posting website, and it actively foes looking to find more employers to offer jobs. It also makes sure that the student gets to do real work, not make coffee all day. If a student feels like he's getting the short end of a stick with a job, he can complain to the university which will look into it and clear things up.
Disclaimer: I am a student at uWaterloo.
How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside).
So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.