MIT alum from the early 00s here. MIT was a stressful place. Much of that stress was self-imposed, and in an environment full of ambitious, intensively competitive over achievers, it can start to create a negative vibe. Turns out, this was good preparation for real life in the competitive fields that many of us chose.
The MIT administration at that time, to their credit, let students do pretty much whatever they wanted - take time off, re-take failed classes, reschedule exams, get special accommodations when needed, whatever. If you asked for help, they helped you. Lots of career admin and support staff who would bend over backwards to make miracles happen. I have never before or since encountered a more supportive administrative environment and it's that experience that will endear me to the Institute forever.
While the campus plays host to protests, anti-protests, and anti-anti-protests on what seems like a weekly basis, the entire student body manages to agree on one thing: the administration is terrible. At their best, they are unhelpful. At their worst, negligent.
I remember the school gave us random days off. They were called Stress Days or something like that. We also had free psychiatric care. I took advantage of it because I was very curious. So for an hour every week, I bitched to poor Edward about people who always told shitty jokes. I was definitely not in a happy place. Became depressed and just stopped caring. It got to the point where my adviser told me to stop fucking around.
Then I quit after my masters and got a job. Having money is so much better than living off of a stupid stipend. Fuck grad school! Wooo!!!
The administration has been a lot more fucked up recently. Current student wisdom blames it on Columbo, who came from Columbia, and seems to have brought a lot of his shitty policies with him. Nightline has been shut down, medical isn't 24/7 anymore, dorm culture is under attack, etc.
Sorry to hear that. I don't know Columbo but I just looked up his bio and he seems to be a more conventional type of administrator who spent almost two decades at Columbia. Why MIT would recruit someone like that from outside the community, and for such an influential position, I don't know - unless he really believed in and embraced MIT's values. Ultimately it's up to you and other current students to keep the open minded hacker culture alive, and on I hope the more the admins try to interfere the more determined and creative you become (another important lesson for the real world).
Do you know what the treatment of students with mental disorders was like?
I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) and am wondering what MIT is like in that regard.
[1] I understand their logic that the student is a thread to their own health and other students' well being, but their heavy handedness is revolting to me.
> I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out)
I'm currently at MIT now as a grad student. The notion that MIT is kicking out students who have mental health problems is a common refrain I hear from undergrads; the thought process being that MIT is trying to limit the on campus suicide rate by driving people out. I have even heard people say they suspect that medical shares psych records with the administration without their permission, which is completely untrue and illegal. I can't speak to whether MIT actually kicks people out for mental health issues (I doubt it) but the fact that this is even a commonly held belief is deeply troubling and counter productive.
I love MIT, but they need to get their shit together and be more transparent about their process in dealing with people who have mental health issues.
Princeton at least is one good HIPAA lawsuit away from a scandal. When I had issues, I went off campus -- to New Brunswick -- to get help and avoid the additional stress of dealing with the administration.
MIT alum from the early 00s here. The administration did very little to make mental health services available to students, did its best to cover up rather than face issues, and generally seemed not to give a shit about students' stress, which is why it had the highest suicide rate in the country. People would joke about how the school colors were "blood and concrete" because of people killing themselves jumping off tall buildings on campus, which happened frequently. My personal experience, when I had a rough early semester, included no offer of mental health services although I was severely depressed, although an administrator did advise me my academic career was over thanks to my poor performance and I would never get into grad school. I suppose this is good prep for a world full of bitter, uncaring, unfeeling people. MIT was a great place in many ways, but this was not one of them.
MIT alum from 1980s here (and former nightline staffer). I am disappointed to hear that NL shut down. We did get non-MIT callers, but the fact that we had dormline (probably doesn't exist any more either -- student-run internal phone system) and no mobile phones limited its reach. There were some horrible suicides back then too, and pretty much everyone had at least one all nighter per week. If I remember the Institute had pretty good mental health services for its time, though I doubt it had free, indefinite length psychotherapy or everyone would have been on it.
But despite the grind I had a really really good time. Perhaps it was because I was (AFAICT) in the bottom half of my (tiny) high school so showed up never worrying about how I was doing compared to other students.
The Institute, at least back then, was impersonal and basically uninterested in undergraduates (not anti-, just didn't care). For me that was liberating: I could take classes in pretty much any department, and if my transcript was a mix of 5.0 and 3.0 that was OK since I was learning a shitload every day. As an undergrad I got to take a lot of graduate seminars and I got to spend a LOT of time in the lab (a majority of my last two years).
> Turns out, this was good preparation for real life in the competitive fields that many of us chose.
I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?
I'm not so sure about that. Some careers are simply known to be very stressful - for example most transactional work (investment banking, corporate lawyers, accounting consulting). It is self-reinforcing in the sense that each company has to keep up with the competition, but I believe that would happen regardless of the level of stress students experience in school. Personally, I have managed to avoid such environments, but for some people, that's the easiest, fastest and least risky way to success.
I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears.
Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions.
I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people.
That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole.
I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that.
No its not weird at all, just goes against the conventional notion of competitiveness. Which is a good thing; look at all the people worrying themselves silly about whether they're "better" than their peers.
The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".
No, not at all. You're the type of person I'd rather work with. I have no desire to compete with anyone for anything.
I've worked places where code reviews were looked at as a way to bash other developers. I don't want any part of that. It's not healthy for developers or the business.
Fortunately, I'm good enough at what I do that I can choose not to work at those places.
I'm only competitive with myself -- I just want to learn. I'm not happy if I'm not learning something and practicing some of my skills. But I'm also quite happy lingering on something and really exhausting its depths.
Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it.
One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know.
I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.
This was true when I was at MIT in the mid-80s as well. I agree it can help you to develop skill in dealing with pressure that will be useful in later life, but there's a fine line between that and beating yourself up for no good reason, and it's not always easy to see where the line is.
The administration when I was there was supportive once you asked for help, but you had to ask. I did not see much proactive effort to try to spot people who were having trouble but hadn't asked for help. There's a fine line there, too, of course.
Do you realize the self-fulfilling nature of the system you describe? It seems somewhat recursive to rationalize that the nature and environment you experienced at MIT was a good preparation for "real life", when the "real life" was also populated by equally damaged and self-harmed individuals. It's kind of an obsessive-compulsive abusive cycle that really isn't necessary, but no one knows how to break out of because, as you state, there is a belief that it is a "good preparation for real life".
It's really a bit of a hugely larger social and cultural issue, our willingness to work ourselves do the bone, with utter disregard for well being; all driven by anxiety and obsessive thinking.
1) I disagree entirely that this is good preparation for most people. Maybe if you go into academia, but not for the vast majority of graduates. In what I see as the real world, the ability to self-regulate your work load (which is a learned skill) and not fall into the trap of fetishizing working ridiculously hard is critical for long term stability. And I say this as someone who finished my PhD at 26. I didn't do it by working in unhealthy ways, and I sure didn't do it by doing every assignment I was given regardless of cost to my mental health. I did it by working healthy and asking for help when I needed it.
2) Surely you're aware of what happens to any undergraduate in our era who admitted to the administration that they were depressed. I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them.
3) I think the biggest issue wrt stress is that undergraduates compete for who has the worst workload. I see it again and again, and it is insane to me. I honestly think a good portion of undergrads, either intentionally or subconsciously, practice horrible work habits just so that later on they can boast about how they finished a 40 hour lab in a three day no-sleep stretch. You know you've seen it too.
4) Depression != Stress. Admitting you're depressed is already hard. Admitting you're depressed when everyone around you is stressed out is a whole other level.
My school (RPI) did something similar with me. I went to health services and asked for help with regards to my mental health. They told me that I needed to drop out and take a full semester off, then attend a community college and consider coming back in a year.
I refused to do this, and they refused to treat me. (I graduated a year later with high honors and a job offer from Google.)
> I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them
can you list some examples?
I had to see a Medical Center counselor (who I didn't like that much) for therapy for a couple semesters, but in general I thought the support offered was well-intentioned and appropriate.
> You know you've seen it too.
I saw some of that ('06), but always thought those people were idiots.
I don't think it would be appropriate to name names. I also used MIT Mental Health, and don't think just using them was sufficient. The problems from my point of view were when someone withdrew from school for a semester due to whatever problem (death in the family, depression, overwork, etc) and couldn't get back in.
In at least one case it took 8 years to get back in, on average I'd guess 2-3 years of forced unenrollment. The one I think was the best off was the one who just gave up on the nonsense and went to a different university where he subsequently graduated with honors, probably also with a lot less stress.
This article perfectly summed up my experience at MIT.
As the article hints, the competitive nature of the student body is a double-edged sword - it helps push you further than you think you're capable of, but it can also push you beyond your breaking point. In a lot of cases, it's a fine line.
To any MIT students reading this:
1) You deserve to be there. Really.
2) You are not alone (read Pepper White's "The Idea Factory" if you don't believe me).
3) Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength.
4) Failing is not the end of the world.
5) Unless you are going to war or face a diagnosis of a terminal disease, everything else after MIT is easy. It gets better.
Please take care of yourselves. Take a break, decompress, have a little fun. The world is a better place with you all in it.
Just for full disclosure, I wasn't close to Fes-Mike, but we lived in the same dorm (New House, I was New House 3, he was Spanish House 2 floors above my room), but we crossed paths a number of times in the halls and he always made time to wave and greet me. I was/am friends with people who were close to him, and the devastation they experienced when we all learned what happened was unforgettable. And to cap it off, some friends and I had to talk a classmate out of committing suicide a little while later.
Overall I enjoyed my experience at MIT, but there were a few soul crushing moments in my time.
Also went to a tech school with similar problems. Depression is an infection of the student's motivation and reason; it's a fixation with the thesis that one is destined to doom. I think the main problem here is that school admins often want to yank problem students for everybody's safety rather than effect policy change that improves livelihood. The latter requires being good at politics, and the leaders who are good at politics usually spend most their time raising money and opening opportunities for the students who aren't struggling. When the chancellor gets involved like this, the admins have failed horribly.
My senior year I took fewer classes and exercised 5x more than ever. I was the happiest I had ever been and had my only straight-A year. I'd advocate tech school admins adopt at least two changes:
1. Professors rarely share stories of their own failures as well as stories of students who failed. The classes should cover not only the consequences of doing well (i.e the key ideas and contributors to the topic) but also the consequences of doing poorly. Evidence and analysis of failure helps debunk convictions to hopelessness
2. "Work-life" balance can be very difficult to achieve in college for a variety of reasons. MIT requires students to pass a swim test, but this is hardly a mandate that students maintain a reliably supportive extracurricular (e.g. sports, art, community involvement etc). Pass-fail should be replaced and/or complimented with a requirement to commit weekly hours to an alternate activity so that students diversify themselves.
Pass-fail can help, but there's a ton of value in having brutally rigorous courses (even if they inspire inordinate competition). It's not useful to make the programs softer but rather make students aware of the realistic (and certainly non-gloomy) consequences of not getting As.
It's not just MIT, it's pretty much any college with a 4 year engineering program. Almost everyone of my classmates took at least an extra semester or summer classes. 2/3 of the Freshman class dropped out (most of them to business school). A few schools have switched over to 5 year programs. Not everyone is cut out for an engineering degree and that's perfectly fine. Yes it's hard, but when you find that one thing you fall in love with you never give it up... That's when you graduate.
I disagree with this sentiment. Suicide rates this high are not acceptable side effects of simply studying engineering. Yes, it's typically a tough program, but action needs to be taken to address a deeper issue. It's the intense pressure to succeed in an environment where stress is worn as a badge of honor that creates these issues, not the academic rigor of studying science/engineering.
These disciplines attract a certain type of personality and are often people of high intelligence. Suicide rates among these cohorts is elevated to begin with. I don't know if it's enough to make up for an extra 4 per 100,000, but I can't help but wonder.
Interesting point. It turns out that introvert personalities are more commonly seen on suicidal forums. Closer inspection reveals that introvert intuitive (IN) type of personalities rank by far highest in suicidal thoughts by this measure, with the exception of INFJ types [1]
> The attitude should be to aim for zero death by suicide. That's acheivable for places like MIT.
I agree zero should be the goal, but I don't think it's necessarily achievable. There are multiple factors involved, and the school only controls some of them. Some of them aren't really controllable. (There were multiple suicides at MIT while I was there; none of them were simple cases of "the school didn't pay enough attention".)
If they can do it then a university can definitely do it.
I do understand the sentiment behind "zero is the aim, but pragmatically we can't stop all suicides", but that attitude allows people to die.
Even if we do accept that we can't stop every death by suicide we can say that the rate is currently far too high.
As one example: People have mentioned deaths from tall buildings. Research shows that you can reduce suicide rates by restricting access to means and methods, so better access[1] controls to rooftops, with anti-suicide fencing, and suicide-prevention telephone number signs, will reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
> If they can do it then a university can definitely do it.
I'm not sure how comparable the two situations are, although there are certainly measures in the article you linked to that could be applied anywhere. The two populations in question (Detroit mental health services patients vs. MIT students) are very different, as are the environments.
> better access controls to rooftops
This was done while I was at MIT, but I think the controls were relaxed again some years after I left. One of the issues with any institution over time is that different administrations have different priorities, and often change things for no good reason. MIT, unfortunately, is not immune to this problem.
And besides that, it selects for a population subset of high achieving teens who have been pressured their entire lives by overbearing parents to have passion for math & science/engineering. They may absolutely have no interest whatsoever, but their "tiger parents" helped them achieve to get in and now they're in deep water with no life boat.
engineering school environments can be very toxic. I think that for the most part it's possible to cover their amount of content in 4 standard years, but there needs to be changes in the structure of constant bewilderment and test taking
If you're interested on a radical new take on engineering education, take a look at Olin College of Engineering. It's not perfect, but it's a move in the right direction -- Olin has traded strict competition for teamwork, tests and exams for project-based learning, and has gone a long way towards removing the stress associated with many other engineering schools. It's a sort of institutional petri dish, and I'm curious to see how many of the principles put in place at this smaller institution are applied in more common settings.
> engineering school environments can be very toxic
I still have very intense school-related nightmares from time to time, even though I'm now in my mid-30s. I decided to drop-out in my last year of CS school, but before that almost any joy of attending my school lectures or studying for its exams had been killed off inside of me (luckily enough for me I discovered PHP and Python during my student years in my free time, which gave me back the joy of building and discovering things).
"It's not just MIT, it's pretty much any college with a 4 year engineering program"
Not at all. I went to a school when engineering was in high demand, and most of the students seemed to be in the program mainly because of the abundance of jobs. Most of the students seemed to disdain people who were really interested in technology and science. Most of the instructors were demoralized by the low quality of the students and had a lot of contempt for the students. It was hard to find a lab partner who could do the work. Most students seemed to be slackers and disparaged students who tried to do things outside of class. The administration was uncaring as well. It was a shitty experience and I had always been envious of the MIT, CalTech, and Berkeley students. I have a lot more respect for the grads from those schools than from my school.
Don't thind that's true. My 4 year program was definitely very challenging. It was tough, there was a lot of pressure to achieve Great Things (culture and history of large, successful student projects).
There were no suicides. And that's in the canadian province (excluding territories) with the highest suicide rate, especially for young men. I did hear about one person who collapsed during an end-of-semester presentation. From stress and exhaustion, I'm assuming.
My theory is that it's because the atmosphere was very much more cooperative than competitive. No one was competing for grades, it wasn't rare to have the whole class helping each other out before exams. There was no grading on a curve, and I think most people realized that at the end of the day grades were not really that important to get a job. Turns out I wish I had realized that they were important to get scholarship money in grad school, but hey, at least I had fun working on awesome projects (while fucking up on exams).
From the campus talk, it seems the Medicine program had it way harder. Very competitive to get into specialties or whatever. There definitely were suicides one in a while.
Class of '03. I certainly saw a lot of classmates under unhealthy levels of stress. But to add some counterpoint, it's not universal.
I think the biggest source of the pain is not MIT itself, it's the way many high schools -- even "good" ones -- fail to prepare students. Learning for mastery is very different from studying for the test. You can get straight A's in high school just studying for the test, so unless some outside force or quirk of personality drives you to work for mastery, you never learn how.
That won't cut it at MIT. So a lot of people discover to their horror that they never actually learned how to master hard material, and they have catching up to do.
I felt well prepared, and I certainly wasn't the only one. Which is actually one of the sources of the stress: the students who are struggling can look around and see others who are not.
I think part of it is also the big fish, little pond --> little fish, big pond phenomenon. When high school teaches you to define yourself as intelligent, academic, and driven and then you're placed in an environment where everyone else has developed a similar set of character traits and amassed a similar collection of academic achievements, I think students suffer a bit of an identity crisis. All of the sudden very key components of one's character are the norm, and the transition is far from easy.
I attended Caltech, which is an equally high pressure school. But being around lots of smart and highly motivated people made for a great deal of fun, too. There were always interesting conversations to drop in on, and amazing projects people were working on just for fun.
Yes, we got pushed, hard. But it is amazing how much one can learn when pushed.
Unfortunately the Caltech administration over the past four years hasn't made things easier. Banning benign traditions and kicking people out of their houses for no reason doesn't help with the stress levels.
I went to MIT, and graduated in 1992. A well-known saying at MIT is "work hard, play hard" -- meaning that you're going to work like crazy to do well in class, and then when it comes to extracurriculars and sports, you're also going to work like crazy to win.
The positive side is that in such an atmosphere, you're always pushing yourself to the limits. You can learn a great deal, and you can accomplish a great deal.
The negative side is that it creates unhealthy expectations -- not necessarily from the MIT administration, but from the students themselves. If you're not acing your classes and running an extracurricular and also playing an instrument in your spare time and doing top-class research, then you're obviously a loser. If you're sleeping eight hours a night, then you're obviously a loser.
Anyone who goes to MIT (or another top-ranked university) is used to being the top student, or one of a handful, to whom everyone points and says, "Wow, they're amazing." And so to go from always being at the top to feeling like you need superhuman abilities just to avoid being classified as a loser, is very tough.
I'm one of those students who consistently failed math tests during freshman year. I remember very well calling my parents, crying on the phone. This was the first time I had failed anything, and to fail a math test of all things was just unheard of.
But then I went to the math department's tutoring room, and found that a huge number of other students, all of whom had been star performers in high school, had also failed. And suddenly I realized that MIT was hard for everyone, and that we were in a different place nowadays.
I was also fortunate to work on the student newspaper, where people talked openly about not necessarily getting terrific grades, or switching majors so that they could manage to graduate. Or just changing priorities, such that getting fantastic grades wasn't the be-all and end-all of being an MIT student. I ended up with a B average, helped in no small part by the humanities courses that I took. And you know what? I turned out OK, with a good career.
It's so, so easy for MIT students to be sucked into thinking that they're either superhuman overachievers or pathetic losers, and that their careers are over at the age of 19 because they flunked a course. For years, MIT has said that they worry about the students who feel this way, because some of them might end up hurting themselves or even taking their own lives.
But it's a tough balancing act to pull off. Because what's negative for some people, and causes so much trauma and damage to them, is a positive motivator for many others.
I'd like for MIT to start giving students a broader view of life. You don't have to be an amazing student to have a good career, family, or life. You can be a happy person and not be a billionaire startup founder. And you can even change your major to something less difficult, if it means being happier.
Really, when you leave college, you're just 21 years old. You have a long, long time to learn more things and change. And I hate to say it, but some of the people who were such stellar superhuman students ended up being the sorts of people you don't necessarily want to hang out with. Given the choice between being a nice person who enjoys life, and one who does groundbreaking research, I'd go for the former. I'm fairly sure that MIT doesn't make that sound like a reasonable, sensible, attainable, or even desirable option. Which is a shame.
This is a topic I've thought a lot about ... here's a strawperson proposal that might incite some discussion, though it's by no means a panacea: http://pgbovine.net/undergrad-course-limits.htm
i think this is a good proposal, zero-sum competitive dynamics means that people are always going to work really hard, but with your course limit idea at least those competitive dynamics won't be directed towards taking lots of modules...one problem is that universities feel like they need to compete with each other in terms of how difficult the modules are and how much they teach their students (even though employers don't really care)..
i think one solution ironically might be to have much less holidays.. right now in the uk the top universities (cambridge and oxford) have two 8 week terms of learning a year, which means all the extra-curricular, social life and academics are crammed in these very compressed periods of time... compare this to tsinghua university (in china) where terms are 17 weeks long and weirdly that means everything is more chilled out because things are more spread out.
i went to lse and the environment was supremely unsupportive. i think there are two fundamental problems with elite universities 1) because uni degree is a sorting/signalling function consumers have limited power. there is no other consumer product that i can think of where the consumer has a bad experience and that reflects on him not the producer's product 2) the misalignment of incentives, where profs towards research not teaching.
i think the solution is to separate learning and signalling into two independent markets and allow market forces to act on them... there is definitley a zero-sum element to all this where people will always be stressed/over-worked as they compete, nonetheless i do think learning these university mathematics subjects can be made an order of magnitude more interesting/addictive.
"...there is no other consumer product that i can think of where the consumer has a bad experience and that reflects on him not the university …"
sounds far fetched to me to relate education and a consumer product.
But basically I agree that a university that is unable to maintain an inspiring atmosphere fails at its most basic job. Under stress, the brain is not receptive to new information. This is a very basic fact. Although handling stress is something to learn as well, education must not be stressful, except maybe prior to exams. If MIT students are under permanent stress, it is unlikely for them to learn and understand science. Hence, MIT can not be an elite university any more.
actually with professional qualifications like accounting, programming, finance and even music grades,, because there is a centralized qualifications board students choose where they get their education (kaplan, etc. ) based on teaching quality/price etc and they have much more consumer power...
i think the solution with elite universities is to have standardised university level exams, especially in maths and science where there is a high degree of similarity in the material at undergraduate level across different universities.. how elite unis differentiate themselves from non-elite is in annual research projects where better resources/professors as well as additional 'value-add lectures' where professors - rather than talking about basic maths and science concepts, instead take advantage of their 'superior research' and have them give regular lectures on what they are researching, so students at elite schools get exposure to high level research...
Woah, fancy bumping into an ex-student - on HN no less. Do you have any survival advice? Something you wish your younger self knew? Exam season is approaching...
i only did one essay module in my entire time at lse (psychology lol) and i hated having to learn all the references haha so no advice. how are you finding lse? it's funny how the most social place on campus is the library lol
Nah, I wouldn't call myself a programmer. I'm just 'technically curious' and enjoy the conversation found on hn. I might try and find work in tech consulting or security later on. References can indeed be a bitch, although you can get away with just a name and date for the exams. I'm enjoying LSE - although studying here has meant very different things at different times. My first 4 or so terms were a bit too social and I'm now taking the work more seriously (and finding it's somewhat fun). I'm definitely in a bit of a work bubble at the moment, so the library is totally my social hub.
cool cool. yeah hn is great for a certain type of perspective on the world that it's hard to get elsewhere.. i suppose it's the hacker mentality lol
well this is kinda random but my best friend and i are looking to apply to yc, our idea is 'A new asset class: Human capital. By paying for a students university education who in return give back a percentage of their annual income (probably developing world) we allow investors to make long-term bets on specific industries and countries.
Yup I’ve given it a look-over. Coincidentally, a friend is also applying to YCombinator later this year so I’m aware of the process.
Let’s compare Seldon to the financing structure of Make School (see: https://www.makeschool.com/admissions).
It seems to me that your idea has three unique selling points: 1) it can cover the cost of going to any university, 2) % repayments are lower and last much longer and 3) student repayments become a tradable asset class. This has pros and cons. Pros: students have total control about where they want to study, return can be much higher and more kids get an education. Cons: students are incentivized to make expensive choices, education is commoditized, return is much slower (you might not break even for decades) and ‘human capital’ (as an unavoidably opaque financial product) is high risk. I think your biggest obstacle will be overcoming volatility and opacity – you’ll need to prove that the candidates you finance will provide good return on investment. What is it about Seldon that means they can offer a student loan a traditional Chinese bank cannot? Maybe adopt some of the strategies Make School and YCombinator use – a rigorous (and prestigious) application process, guidance, relationship building, sense of community, commercial nouse ect. I wouldn’t sell the idea as a cold-hearted asset class at the start and I certainly would change the name – it undermines the true value of your project. Make human capital a little more…human? Besides, tradable asset classes only really emerge once a financial product is big and established enough to be traded.
Other points:
• 2% seems too low? (I’m not a numbers guy)
• This business would not work in the UK (~50% of students never pay back the full amount they borrow…so no financial incentive to use Seldon)
• Top US schools usually cover all their students financing needs – so not too much of a market there unless you want to grab higher-risk candidates. (MBAs are the BIG exception – probably some good opportunities there).
• Highlight who you both are - your past achievements and work (because it’s good).
• Take your private contact info off of the website (it’s in the public domain, yo).
• I like the basic idea – but you need to be more conscious about the fact you’re dealing with 18 year olds and not, say, crude oil.
thanks xander this is great feedback. hit me up on facebook if u get the chance (https://www.facebook.com/DrakeNicholas).. me and my friend actually spent 4hours last night completley redoing our application, answering the questions concisely has been really challenging/clarifying our thinking (but in a good way!), so what u saw is a little out of date...
nonetheless in addition to what you said i would point out one more advantage for students (probably the biggest one) which is repayments are dependent upon your situation (because it's a percentage of income) so if you're 'unlucky' and can't find a job or only a low-paying job you pay less - which is good if you are a risk-averse/poor student..
in terms of the cons, i actually think hte aggregated income streams are likely to be very stable.. despite it's equity structure we see it more as a fixed income product than a vc equity product (stable but lowish ~5% returns). the moral hazard is an interesting issue that we hadn't thought about much - i suspect the larger issue what not be in their university choice but rather their post university choices... currently faced with debts students would look to find a high paying job immediately, whereas with our instrument they might travle the world care free knowing they don't have to pay anything unless they get a job? in terms of becoming a tradable asset class that is very much a long-term potential. we could end up trying to be originators for asset backed securities but right now our thinking is it's better for us to actually invest the money ourselves and get returns ourselves. the opacity issue is interesting - opacity from whose perspective? it mihgt only be a problem if it's traded on markets right?
in terms of proving returns - at this stage we can collect data on graduate incomes and estimate returns but of course the proof will be in the pudding. our selection process for the students will almost entirely be delegated to the universities ie.. if you can get into the best university in india we'll fund you
i think the big positives which your analysis missed (and actually we're most excited about) is not the student side but the investor side in particular we think that long-run income streams are a much better proxy for country/industry success than betting on a specific company in that industry (what buffet calls trying to 'pick the winners'). for example suppose your bullish on chinese software as an industry... what is a better long-term bet? the very risky (although higher reward) vc bet of picking a particular chinese software company or sending 100 of the brightest chinese students to study computer science with the assumption that if the chinese software industry does well so will employees in that industry. furthermore, this will bring in a lot more capital to big risky capital-intensive projects and through tranching out the risk will enable much more investment and ultimatley innovation in our societies...
re: 2% yeah it may be without going into the numbers lol 2% requires average annual income to be 11x cost of university. in america if uni costs $30,000 that means we need incomes to be more than $300,000 which even with the fact we're hand picking the smartest students and the fact you have future economic growth (and inflation) over 35 years to help you out it doesn't seem like a good investment. in china though the cost of the best 4 year uniiversity (accomodation + tuition fees) ~$3,000-$4,000 so it seems very reasonable that average incomes coudl be 10x that (and we find that the data supports that)... obviously from an investors stand-point a higher than 2% interest rate is better but we're not sure how much students will accept so we're currently testing that (at the 2% level) with our chinese version of hte website and asking for interested students to email us..
yeah i managed to find some of his stuff on youtube... seems like it was pretty marginal idea with benefits being an aggregation of software streamlining of traditional lending + some career advice + job search functionality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Ls_ZcQM80
I did engineering at Oxford, where we had problem sets every week as well. I'd try hard, but not because there was a grade that counted. There would be a 2-on-1 tutorial for each set, and you really don't want to be the guy who didn't make an effort.
On the other hand, if something was simply too hard, we didn't let it stress us out either. I remember emailing a tutor at 2am once and telling him both students found it way too hard and needed more time. Got a response 5 mins later saying no prob.
As for impostor syndrome, you need a healthy confidence. Naturally there are people who are smarter than you, but equally when you're at a world class institution it's because someone decided you are world class. And they had a lot of people to choose from, most of who are doing quite well at less prestigious places. Where they learn the same stuff.
You also shouldn't worry about rank. Only one guy get the top prize, but everyone can understand the subject matter.
Here is an interesting comment from Andrew S. Tanenbaum(a famous author on Operating system and Networking)
Did you experience culture shock going from M.I.T. to Berkeley?
Oh my goodness. Yes. It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.'s below 150 and where it wasn't necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.
MIT classes are individually quite hard, but I also find many MIT undergrads simply try to do way too much. Students frequently sign up for twice as many classes as one should, volunteer in two or three labs at once, or volunteer in three or more organizations. Success during high school and college admissions is largely based on quantity over depth, which is poor preparation for actual college and life.
P.S. I don't mean to blame the students for the consequences of these choices. I think the administration could help by providing a clear picture of success, and providing better services. I just think this is a source of stress outside of individual class difficulties.
Old VI-3 geezer from the late 70s, early 80s here - the time when the EECS faculty tried to handle their over-subscription problem by (unsuccessfully) imposing their own, separate admission requirements and flunking out a significant fraction of EECS wannabes into other majors. Had an advisor who tried to get me to join the Armed forces instead of stay in school. Watched the Dept deny tenure to the only EECS prof to actually teach us and treat us as human beings.
Certainly makes those calls/emails from the MIT full-time alumni fundraisers feel, well, surreal.
My buddies and I experienced similar situations, albeit not at MIT, but at a private US D1 University as we pursued our dreams of medical school.
Luckily we basically threw in the towel one day and said it wasn't worth the stress anymore. We learned the importance of Pareto's Principle, Parkinson's Law, and a good nights sleep.
The crazy thing is our grades remained unchanged.
These were great life lessons that we learned that I wouldn't trade for the world.
Although I chose not to pursue medical school, both my buddies are in their first years and they constantly witness similar experiences to the article above and our initial undergraduate experiences, regardless of the schools that their classmates graduated from - MIT included.
Meanwhile my friends are doing very well in graduate school and continue to have just as much time as during our undergraduate years.
I hate to say it, but if it wasn't MIT, it probably would have been something else for these kids.
In baseball terms, round the bases with singles instead of always swinging for the home run.
Also, don't marry someone that you'll have to give everything you've ever earned to get out of your life.
It's hard to summarize all my life's experiences. I tried very hard to learn from my parent's and other's mistakes. I'm not a failure, but I'm not retirement wealthy either.
Best advice is read a lot of writeups on failed startups more than successful ones (if that's your goal). You learn more by seeing where people could have done better than by studying those that for the most part got lucky (yes they worked hard too, but sometimes timing, connections, location, etc. doesn't work out).
If you're looking toward just being successful in your career, that's a different line of study (how to win friends and influence people, etc.).
If you'd like to have an actual discussion, shoot me your email. I'd meet the criteria for failed startup founder (I'm on #7 or 8 right now, too lazy to go review how many failed I've had :-)
Pareto principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
(also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes
I agree. I got my ECE degree from Rutgers, which is considered by many professors to be the hardest at the school. I worked very hard but I always had time to relax with friends and unwind every day. I never pulled an all nighter and have never needed to, and feel it's a study habit smell if you do (barring extreme circumstances). I just learned to be efficient with my time, partition my work, and plan ahead. I considered relaxing as important as studying itself and programmed it into my routine. And you know what? I got excellent grades and had a great time.
I guess I should feel for these people since I'm in an academic slump myself - though not any equivalent of MIT or anything. But what do you expect when you willingly play in the big leagues of nerd status jockeying? If your self-worth was tied to being the best and brightest in class, you probably won't keep up with it at a place like that (I mean, do the math, it seems straightforward to me).
I went to normal landgrant university in ND (NDSU) and received a Computer Engineering degree. I can tell you, my experience holds many similarities. Learning to accept and grow from failure is a key component of an engineering education.
I never attended MIT, nor any big name college, but I have first hand experience struggling with impostor syndrome that I had since leaving high school and never having failed at anything I set my mind to. It was immediately noticeable from the first university math lecture where I was amongst an entire class of people who grasped concepts I had never even come across at high school and struggled to understand - even though I had never struggled at anything before in my life. I'd coasted through high school and nery once had to apply myself at anything - except Phys Ed. which was more a toil of will power than enjoyment. The feeling lasted until probably 5 or so years ago (my early 30s) - in fact, it had been such a prominent part of my psyche during that part of my life that it hadn't crossed my mind that I'd moved on until just as I was reading this article.
Upon reflection, I think most of the feeling stemmed from my perception of how other people were handling themselves in a world I personally felt I was floundering in. They appeared to take everything in their stride, understanding everything while I understood nothing and spent many thousands of hours attempting to understand just to keep from failing academic life - forget trying to be top of my class as I was used to. Then I became a programmer, thinking that once I left university, I would be okay; at that point, I would have made it. But the feeling never went away as I continued to feel like I was floundering, while my peers appeared to breeze through concepts I had to work bloody hard to grasp. It took many years for it to dawn on me that I spent far too long looking at how other people looked like they were handling it and comparing it to the actual struggles I was having. This has been dubbed the Facebook effect, where everyone else appears to have such a great life because that's what they show the world and you compare that to the struggles you have just to find time to shower, forget looking perfect.
I have come to believe that impostor syndrome is a symptom of the lack of authenticity in society. Nobody is real with each other and that largely is the cause of our inability to gauge how deserving we are of the positions we hold. Behind closed doors, everyone is floundering in different aspects of their lives. Some areas of life come easily to some, while others remain a constant struggle their entire lives - but what they show you is a tiny snippet - the snippet they want to show you. As Baz Lurhman said in Sunscreen, "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind, the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself." It has only really been as I have come to see and understand this pervasive lack of authenticity in society that the impostor syndrome has gone away. I believe that eventually all people get there, they say that 40 is the age that you stop caring what other people think and start living for yourself. I think it goes deeper than this and isn't tied to an age. I think as soon as you hit the dawning realization that everything you see around you is no more than what those around you want to show you and that it's all a carefully sculpted illusion to make you believe what they want you to believe about them, their lives, their businesses etc. you will realize...
You are not an impostor. You are in the position you are in because someone sees or saw something in you that you haven't yet begun to see, understand or accept in yourself. They gave you the chance you asked for because they believed in you - even when you may not have believed in yourself. The impostor syndrome you are experiencing is an illusion. You may not understand that yet, you may not accept that yet, but trust me, as someone who spent a larger portion of my life battling it than not battling it, you will make it, you did deserve the chance you were given, you do deserve to be doing what you are doing. You are already what you are struggling to realize and you don't need to f...
I think this happens in all the top Universities. I study in one myself and professors expect people to put in 20-25 hours per week for a course with 9 hours worth credit. And the reason given is that it gives us a competitive edge!
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThe MIT administration at that time, to their credit, let students do pretty much whatever they wanted - take time off, re-take failed classes, reschedule exams, get special accommodations when needed, whatever. If you asked for help, they helped you. Lots of career admin and support staff who would bend over backwards to make miracles happen. I have never before or since encountered a more supportive administrative environment and it's that experience that will endear me to the Institute forever.
Then I quit after my masters and got a job. Having money is so much better than living off of a stupid stipend. Fuck grad school! Wooo!!!
I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) and am wondering what MIT is like in that regard.
[1] I understand their logic that the student is a thread to their own health and other students' well being, but their heavy handedness is revolting to me.
I'm currently at MIT now as a grad student. The notion that MIT is kicking out students who have mental health problems is a common refrain I hear from undergrads; the thought process being that MIT is trying to limit the on campus suicide rate by driving people out. I have even heard people say they suspect that medical shares psych records with the administration without their permission, which is completely untrue and illegal. I can't speak to whether MIT actually kicks people out for mental health issues (I doubt it) but the fact that this is even a commonly held belief is deeply troubling and counter productive.
I love MIT, but they need to get their shit together and be more transparent about their process in dealing with people who have mental health issues.
But despite the grind I had a really really good time. Perhaps it was because I was (AFAICT) in the bottom half of my (tiny) high school so showed up never worrying about how I was doing compared to other students.
The Institute, at least back then, was impersonal and basically uninterested in undergraduates (not anti-, just didn't care). For me that was liberating: I could take classes in pretty much any department, and if my transcript was a mix of 5.0 and 3.0 that was OK since I was learning a shitload every day. As an undergrad I got to take a lot of graduate seminars and I got to spend a LOT of time in the lab (a majority of my last two years).
I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?
I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears.
Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions.
I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people.
That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole.
I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that.
I would rather quit.
The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".
Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it.
One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know.
I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.
This was true when I was at MIT in the mid-80s as well. I agree it can help you to develop skill in dealing with pressure that will be useful in later life, but there's a fine line between that and beating yourself up for no good reason, and it's not always easy to see where the line is.
The administration when I was there was supportive once you asked for help, but you had to ask. I did not see much proactive effort to try to spot people who were having trouble but hadn't asked for help. There's a fine line there, too, of course.
It's really a bit of a hugely larger social and cultural issue, our willingness to work ourselves do the bone, with utter disregard for well being; all driven by anxiety and obsessive thinking.
1) I disagree entirely that this is good preparation for most people. Maybe if you go into academia, but not for the vast majority of graduates. In what I see as the real world, the ability to self-regulate your work load (which is a learned skill) and not fall into the trap of fetishizing working ridiculously hard is critical for long term stability. And I say this as someone who finished my PhD at 26. I didn't do it by working in unhealthy ways, and I sure didn't do it by doing every assignment I was given regardless of cost to my mental health. I did it by working healthy and asking for help when I needed it.
2) Surely you're aware of what happens to any undergraduate in our era who admitted to the administration that they were depressed. I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them.
3) I think the biggest issue wrt stress is that undergraduates compete for who has the worst workload. I see it again and again, and it is insane to me. I honestly think a good portion of undergrads, either intentionally or subconsciously, practice horrible work habits just so that later on they can boast about how they finished a 40 hour lab in a three day no-sleep stretch. You know you've seen it too.
4) Depression != Stress. Admitting you're depressed is already hard. Admitting you're depressed when everyone around you is stressed out is a whole other level.
I refused to do this, and they refused to treat me. (I graduated a year later with high honors and a job offer from Google.)
can you list some examples? I had to see a Medical Center counselor (who I didn't like that much) for therapy for a couple semesters, but in general I thought the support offered was well-intentioned and appropriate.
> You know you've seen it too.
I saw some of that ('06), but always thought those people were idiots.
In at least one case it took 8 years to get back in, on average I'd guess 2-3 years of forced unenrollment. The one I think was the best off was the one who just gave up on the nonsense and went to a different university where he subsequently graduated with honors, probably also with a lot less stress.
As the article hints, the competitive nature of the student body is a double-edged sword - it helps push you further than you think you're capable of, but it can also push you beyond your breaking point. In a lot of cases, it's a fine line.
To any MIT students reading this:
1) You deserve to be there. Really.
2) You are not alone (read Pepper White's "The Idea Factory" if you don't believe me).
3) Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength.
4) Failing is not the end of the world.
5) Unless you are going to war or face a diagnosis of a terminal disease, everything else after MIT is easy. It gets better.
Please take care of yourselves. Take a break, decompress, have a little fun. The world is a better place with you all in it.
RIP Fes-Mike http://tech.mit.edu/V113/N3/martinez.03o.html
Overall I enjoyed my experience at MIT, but there were a few soul crushing moments in my time.
close enough.
My senior year I took fewer classes and exercised 5x more than ever. I was the happiest I had ever been and had my only straight-A year. I'd advocate tech school admins adopt at least two changes:
1. Professors rarely share stories of their own failures as well as stories of students who failed. The classes should cover not only the consequences of doing well (i.e the key ideas and contributors to the topic) but also the consequences of doing poorly. Evidence and analysis of failure helps debunk convictions to hopelessness
2. "Work-life" balance can be very difficult to achieve in college for a variety of reasons. MIT requires students to pass a swim test, but this is hardly a mandate that students maintain a reliably supportive extracurricular (e.g. sports, art, community involvement etc). Pass-fail should be replaced and/or complimented with a requirement to commit weekly hours to an alternate activity so that students diversify themselves.
Pass-fail can help, but there's a ton of value in having brutally rigorous courses (even if they inspire inordinate competition). It's not useful to make the programs softer but rather make students aware of the realistic (and certainly non-gloomy) consequences of not getting As.
[1] http://intjforum.com/showthread.php?t=74782
It's fucking scandalous that MIT tolerates such a high level of death by suicide.
I agree zero should be the goal, but I don't think it's necessarily achievable. There are multiple factors involved, and the school only controls some of them. Some of them aren't really controllable. (There were multiple suicides at MIT while I was there; none of them were simple cases of "the school didn't pay enough attention".)
http://www.henryford.com/body.cfm?id=46335&action=detail&ref...
If they can do it then a university can definitely do it.
I do understand the sentiment behind "zero is the aim, but pragmatically we can't stop all suicides", but that attitude allows people to die.
Even if we do accept that we can't stop every death by suicide we can say that the rate is currently far too high.
As one example: People have mentioned deaths from tall buildings. Research shows that you can reduce suicide rates by restricting access to means and methods, so better access[1] controls to rooftops, with anti-suicide fencing, and suicide-prevention telephone number signs, will reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
I'm not sure how comparable the two situations are, although there are certainly measures in the article you linked to that could be applied anywhere. The two populations in question (Detroit mental health services patients vs. MIT students) are very different, as are the environments.
> better access controls to rooftops
This was done while I was at MIT, but I think the controls were relaxed again some years after I left. One of the issues with any institution over time is that different administrations have different priorities, and often change things for no good reason. MIT, unfortunately, is not immune to this problem.
I still have very intense school-related nightmares from time to time, even though I'm now in my mid-30s. I decided to drop-out in my last year of CS school, but before that almost any joy of attending my school lectures or studying for its exams had been killed off inside of me (luckily enough for me I discovered PHP and Python during my student years in my free time, which gave me back the joy of building and discovering things).
Not at all. I went to a school when engineering was in high demand, and most of the students seemed to be in the program mainly because of the abundance of jobs. Most of the students seemed to disdain people who were really interested in technology and science. Most of the instructors were demoralized by the low quality of the students and had a lot of contempt for the students. It was hard to find a lab partner who could do the work. Most students seemed to be slackers and disparaged students who tried to do things outside of class. The administration was uncaring as well. It was a shitty experience and I had always been envious of the MIT, CalTech, and Berkeley students. I have a lot more respect for the grads from those schools than from my school.
There were no suicides. And that's in the canadian province (excluding territories) with the highest suicide rate, especially for young men. I did hear about one person who collapsed during an end-of-semester presentation. From stress and exhaustion, I'm assuming.
My theory is that it's because the atmosphere was very much more cooperative than competitive. No one was competing for grades, it wasn't rare to have the whole class helping each other out before exams. There was no grading on a curve, and I think most people realized that at the end of the day grades were not really that important to get a job. Turns out I wish I had realized that they were important to get scholarship money in grad school, but hey, at least I had fun working on awesome projects (while fucking up on exams).
From the campus talk, it seems the Medicine program had it way harder. Very competitive to get into specialties or whatever. There definitely were suicides one in a while.
I think the biggest source of the pain is not MIT itself, it's the way many high schools -- even "good" ones -- fail to prepare students. Learning for mastery is very different from studying for the test. You can get straight A's in high school just studying for the test, so unless some outside force or quirk of personality drives you to work for mastery, you never learn how.
That won't cut it at MIT. So a lot of people discover to their horror that they never actually learned how to master hard material, and they have catching up to do.
I felt well prepared, and I certainly wasn't the only one. Which is actually one of the sources of the stress: the students who are struggling can look around and see others who are not.
Yes, we got pushed, hard. But it is amazing how much one can learn when pushed.
The positive side is that in such an atmosphere, you're always pushing yourself to the limits. You can learn a great deal, and you can accomplish a great deal.
The negative side is that it creates unhealthy expectations -- not necessarily from the MIT administration, but from the students themselves. If you're not acing your classes and running an extracurricular and also playing an instrument in your spare time and doing top-class research, then you're obviously a loser. If you're sleeping eight hours a night, then you're obviously a loser.
Anyone who goes to MIT (or another top-ranked university) is used to being the top student, or one of a handful, to whom everyone points and says, "Wow, they're amazing." And so to go from always being at the top to feeling like you need superhuman abilities just to avoid being classified as a loser, is very tough.
I'm one of those students who consistently failed math tests during freshman year. I remember very well calling my parents, crying on the phone. This was the first time I had failed anything, and to fail a math test of all things was just unheard of.
But then I went to the math department's tutoring room, and found that a huge number of other students, all of whom had been star performers in high school, had also failed. And suddenly I realized that MIT was hard for everyone, and that we were in a different place nowadays.
I was also fortunate to work on the student newspaper, where people talked openly about not necessarily getting terrific grades, or switching majors so that they could manage to graduate. Or just changing priorities, such that getting fantastic grades wasn't the be-all and end-all of being an MIT student. I ended up with a B average, helped in no small part by the humanities courses that I took. And you know what? I turned out OK, with a good career.
It's so, so easy for MIT students to be sucked into thinking that they're either superhuman overachievers or pathetic losers, and that their careers are over at the age of 19 because they flunked a course. For years, MIT has said that they worry about the students who feel this way, because some of them might end up hurting themselves or even taking their own lives.
But it's a tough balancing act to pull off. Because what's negative for some people, and causes so much trauma and damage to them, is a positive motivator for many others.
I'd like for MIT to start giving students a broader view of life. You don't have to be an amazing student to have a good career, family, or life. You can be a happy person and not be a billionaire startup founder. And you can even change your major to something less difficult, if it means being happier.
Really, when you leave college, you're just 21 years old. You have a long, long time to learn more things and change. And I hate to say it, but some of the people who were such stellar superhuman students ended up being the sorts of people you don't necessarily want to hang out with. Given the choice between being a nice person who enjoys life, and one who does groundbreaking research, I'd go for the former. I'm fairly sure that MIT doesn't make that sound like a reasonable, sensible, attainable, or even desirable option. Which is a shame.
i think one solution ironically might be to have much less holidays.. right now in the uk the top universities (cambridge and oxford) have two 8 week terms of learning a year, which means all the extra-curricular, social life and academics are crammed in these very compressed periods of time... compare this to tsinghua university (in china) where terms are 17 weeks long and weirdly that means everything is more chilled out because things are more spread out.
First time I've seen it put like that but Google seems to indicate this is a common synonym for "strawman" in this sense.
Is there actually a separate usage between "strawman" and "strawperson" or is it just political correctness? I'm genuinely interested.
sounds far fetched to me to relate education and a consumer product. But basically I agree that a university that is unable to maintain an inspiring atmosphere fails at its most basic job. Under stress, the brain is not receptive to new information. This is a very basic fact. Although handling stress is something to learn as well, education must not be stressful, except maybe prior to exams. If MIT students are under permanent stress, it is unlikely for them to learn and understand science. Hence, MIT can not be an elite university any more.
i think the solution with elite universities is to have standardised university level exams, especially in maths and science where there is a high degree of similarity in the material at undergraduate level across different universities.. how elite unis differentiate themselves from non-elite is in annual research projects where better resources/professors as well as additional 'value-add lectures' where professors - rather than talking about basic maths and science concepts, instead take advantage of their 'superior research' and have them give regular lectures on what they are researching, so students at elite schools get exposure to high level research...
what brings u to hn? u a programmer?
well this is kinda random but my best friend and i are looking to apply to yc, our idea is 'A new asset class: Human capital. By paying for a students university education who in return give back a percentage of their annual income (probably developing world) we allow investors to make long-term bets on specific industries and countries.
Anyway our first draft of our yc application is here , it will be great if you can take a look and give some feedback... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224487
Let’s compare Seldon to the financing structure of Make School (see: https://www.makeschool.com/admissions). It seems to me that your idea has three unique selling points: 1) it can cover the cost of going to any university, 2) % repayments are lower and last much longer and 3) student repayments become a tradable asset class. This has pros and cons. Pros: students have total control about where they want to study, return can be much higher and more kids get an education. Cons: students are incentivized to make expensive choices, education is commoditized, return is much slower (you might not break even for decades) and ‘human capital’ (as an unavoidably opaque financial product) is high risk. I think your biggest obstacle will be overcoming volatility and opacity – you’ll need to prove that the candidates you finance will provide good return on investment. What is it about Seldon that means they can offer a student loan a traditional Chinese bank cannot? Maybe adopt some of the strategies Make School and YCombinator use – a rigorous (and prestigious) application process, guidance, relationship building, sense of community, commercial nouse ect. I wouldn’t sell the idea as a cold-hearted asset class at the start and I certainly would change the name – it undermines the true value of your project. Make human capital a little more…human? Besides, tradable asset classes only really emerge once a financial product is big and established enough to be traded.
Other points: • 2% seems too low? (I’m not a numbers guy) • This business would not work in the UK (~50% of students never pay back the full amount they borrow…so no financial incentive to use Seldon) • Top US schools usually cover all their students financing needs – so not too much of a market there unless you want to grab higher-risk candidates. (MBAs are the BIG exception – probably some good opportunities there). • Highlight who you both are - your past achievements and work (because it’s good). • Take your private contact info off of the website (it’s in the public domain, yo). • I like the basic idea – but you need to be more conscious about the fact you’re dealing with 18 year olds and not, say, crude oil.
nonetheless in addition to what you said i would point out one more advantage for students (probably the biggest one) which is repayments are dependent upon your situation (because it's a percentage of income) so if you're 'unlucky' and can't find a job or only a low-paying job you pay less - which is good if you are a risk-averse/poor student..
in terms of the cons, i actually think hte aggregated income streams are likely to be very stable.. despite it's equity structure we see it more as a fixed income product than a vc equity product (stable but lowish ~5% returns). the moral hazard is an interesting issue that we hadn't thought about much - i suspect the larger issue what not be in their university choice but rather their post university choices... currently faced with debts students would look to find a high paying job immediately, whereas with our instrument they might travle the world care free knowing they don't have to pay anything unless they get a job? in terms of becoming a tradable asset class that is very much a long-term potential. we could end up trying to be originators for asset backed securities but right now our thinking is it's better for us to actually invest the money ourselves and get returns ourselves. the opacity issue is interesting - opacity from whose perspective? it mihgt only be a problem if it's traded on markets right?
in terms of proving returns - at this stage we can collect data on graduate incomes and estimate returns but of course the proof will be in the pudding. our selection process for the students will almost entirely be delegated to the universities ie.. if you can get into the best university in india we'll fund you
i think the big positives which your analysis missed (and actually we're most excited about) is not the student side but the investor side in particular we think that long-run income streams are a much better proxy for country/industry success than betting on a specific company in that industry (what buffet calls trying to 'pick the winners'). for example suppose your bullish on chinese software as an industry... what is a better long-term bet? the very risky (although higher reward) vc bet of picking a particular chinese software company or sending 100 of the brightest chinese students to study computer science with the assumption that if the chinese software industry does well so will employees in that industry. furthermore, this will bring in a lot more capital to big risky capital-intensive projects and through tranching out the risk will enable much more investment and ultimatley innovation in our societies...
re: 2% yeah it may be without going into the numbers lol 2% requires average annual income to be 11x cost of university. in america if uni costs $30,000 that means we need incomes to be more than $300,000 which even with the fact we're hand picking the smartest students and the fact you have future economic growth (and inflation) over 35 years to help you out it doesn't seem like a good investment. in china though the cost of the best 4 year uniiversity (accomodation + tuition fees) ~$3,000-$4,000 so it seems very reasonable that average incomes coudl be 10x that (and we find that the data supports that)... obviously from an investors stand-point a higher than 2% interest rate is better but we're not sure how much students will accept so we're currently testing that (at the 2% level) with our chinese version of hte website and asking for interested students to email us..
i think it doesn't work in...
I did engineering at Oxford, where we had problem sets every week as well. I'd try hard, but not because there was a grade that counted. There would be a 2-on-1 tutorial for each set, and you really don't want to be the guy who didn't make an effort.
On the other hand, if something was simply too hard, we didn't let it stress us out either. I remember emailing a tutor at 2am once and telling him both students found it way too hard and needed more time. Got a response 5 mins later saying no prob.
As for impostor syndrome, you need a healthy confidence. Naturally there are people who are smarter than you, but equally when you're at a world class institution it's because someone decided you are world class. And they had a lot of people to choose from, most of who are doing quite well at less prestigious places. Where they learn the same stuff.
You also shouldn't worry about rank. Only one guy get the top prize, but everyone can understand the subject matter.
Did you experience culture shock going from M.I.T. to Berkeley?
Oh my goodness. Yes. It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.'s below 150 and where it wasn't necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.
Source: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/faq.html
"Nobody likes M.I.T. People respect it. I respect it. But like it? Does anyone like taking a drink from a fire hose? I am still in awe of the place."
P.S. I don't mean to blame the students for the consequences of these choices. I think the administration could help by providing a clear picture of success, and providing better services. I just think this is a source of stress outside of individual class difficulties.
Certainly makes those calls/emails from the MIT full-time alumni fundraisers feel, well, surreal.
Luckily we basically threw in the towel one day and said it wasn't worth the stress anymore. We learned the importance of Pareto's Principle, Parkinson's Law, and a good nights sleep.
The crazy thing is our grades remained unchanged.
These were great life lessons that we learned that I wouldn't trade for the world.
Although I chose not to pursue medical school, both my buddies are in their first years and they constantly witness similar experiences to the article above and our initial undergraduate experiences, regardless of the schools that their classmates graduated from - MIT included.
Meanwhile my friends are doing very well in graduate school and continue to have just as much time as during our undergraduate years.
I hate to say it, but if it wasn't MIT, it probably would have been something else for these kids.
Hard Work != Productivity
Figuring it out though can be the difficult part.
In baseball terms, round the bases with singles instead of always swinging for the home run.
Also, don't marry someone that you'll have to give everything you've ever earned to get out of your life.
It's hard to summarize all my life's experiences. I tried very hard to learn from my parent's and other's mistakes. I'm not a failure, but I'm not retirement wealthy either.
Best advice is read a lot of writeups on failed startups more than successful ones (if that's your goal). You learn more by seeing where people could have done better than by studying those that for the most part got lucky (yes they worked hard too, but sometimes timing, connections, location, etc. doesn't work out).
If you're looking toward just being successful in your career, that's a different line of study (how to win friends and influence people, etc.).
If you'd like to have an actual discussion, shoot me your email. I'd meet the criteria for failed startup founder (I'm on #7 or 8 right now, too lazy to go review how many failed I've had :-)
Pareto principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes
Parkinson's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
Upon reflection, I think most of the feeling stemmed from my perception of how other people were handling themselves in a world I personally felt I was floundering in. They appeared to take everything in their stride, understanding everything while I understood nothing and spent many thousands of hours attempting to understand just to keep from failing academic life - forget trying to be top of my class as I was used to. Then I became a programmer, thinking that once I left university, I would be okay; at that point, I would have made it. But the feeling never went away as I continued to feel like I was floundering, while my peers appeared to breeze through concepts I had to work bloody hard to grasp. It took many years for it to dawn on me that I spent far too long looking at how other people looked like they were handling it and comparing it to the actual struggles I was having. This has been dubbed the Facebook effect, where everyone else appears to have such a great life because that's what they show the world and you compare that to the struggles you have just to find time to shower, forget looking perfect.
I have come to believe that impostor syndrome is a symptom of the lack of authenticity in society. Nobody is real with each other and that largely is the cause of our inability to gauge how deserving we are of the positions we hold. Behind closed doors, everyone is floundering in different aspects of their lives. Some areas of life come easily to some, while others remain a constant struggle their entire lives - but what they show you is a tiny snippet - the snippet they want to show you. As Baz Lurhman said in Sunscreen, "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind, the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself." It has only really been as I have come to see and understand this pervasive lack of authenticity in society that the impostor syndrome has gone away. I believe that eventually all people get there, they say that 40 is the age that you stop caring what other people think and start living for yourself. I think it goes deeper than this and isn't tied to an age. I think as soon as you hit the dawning realization that everything you see around you is no more than what those around you want to show you and that it's all a carefully sculpted illusion to make you believe what they want you to believe about them, their lives, their businesses etc. you will realize...
You are not an impostor. You are in the position you are in because someone sees or saw something in you that you haven't yet begun to see, understand or accept in yourself. They gave you the chance you asked for because they believed in you - even when you may not have believed in yourself. The impostor syndrome you are experiencing is an illusion. You may not understand that yet, you may not accept that yet, but trust me, as someone who spent a larger portion of my life battling it than not battling it, you will make it, you did deserve the chance you were given, you do deserve to be doing what you are doing. You are already what you are struggling to realize and you don't need to f...