The mindset they’re starting with is “I have energy and intellect to spare. So I put it into perfecting my grades, into side projects, and into internships. I don’t just want to do well enough to get to the next level.
I am impatient to finish. I don’t just want to do good research for an undergraduate; I want my undergraduate thesis to be worthy of peer review and publication. I don’t just want to fiddle around with fun software projects while I’m learning to code; I want to build something that’s actually useful for people.”
This mindset actually worked pretty well for me, as looking back, college was seemingly the most productive years of my life (as measured by actually useful stuff done per unit of time). (Could be just an outlier / anecdote, but still seems worth mentioning here as otherwise people would update on the absence of such anecdotes.) Stuff that I did during college:
Wrote a paper that my internship mentor thought was worth submitting to top academic crypto conferences. (But I gave up after receiving nonsensical feedback, which also soured me on academia entirely.)
That’s a helpful data point, thank you! I wonder if part of your outcome is driven by working in software/CS/crypto. This seems like an unusually tractable space for a young individual with good ideas.
My field is biomedical engineering, where access to equipment, reagents, collaborators, training, and sheer biochemical knowledge and lab skills are major bottlenecks.
I could also just be wrong, though. My journey through college has been unusual.
Edit: maybe the way to reconcile this is that college demands tangible outputs: assignments, projects, things you can put on your resume. But making a real difference is about applying your efforts to good ideas, and there’s a lot of intangible exploration that has to happen up front in order to discover the right idea. So satisficing college’s demand for legible, tangible production frees up space both to improve your wellbeing and to search for the ideas that matter.
This mindset actually worked pretty well for me, as looking back, college was seemingly the most productive years of my life (as measured by actually useful stuff done per unit of time). (Could be just an outlier / anecdote, but still seems worth mentioning here as otherwise people would update on the absence of such anecdotes.) Stuff that I did during college:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto%2B%2B
https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/B-money
UDASSA, a precursor to UDT
Wrote a paper that my internship mentor thought was worth submitting to top academic crypto conferences. (But I gave up after receiving nonsensical feedback, which also soured me on academia entirely.)
That’s a helpful data point, thank you! I wonder if part of your outcome is driven by working in software/CS/crypto. This seems like an unusually tractable space for a young individual with good ideas.
My field is biomedical engineering, where access to equipment, reagents, collaborators, training, and sheer biochemical knowledge and lab skills are major bottlenecks.
I could also just be wrong, though. My journey through college has been unusual.
Edit: maybe the way to reconcile this is that college demands tangible outputs: assignments, projects, things you can put on your resume. But making a real difference is about applying your efforts to good ideas, and there’s a lot of intangible exploration that has to happen up front in order to discover the right idea. So satisficing college’s demand for legible, tangible production frees up space both to improve your wellbeing and to search for the ideas that matter.