I was unsure where to post this question; let me know whether it merits its own thread. I also apologize if this post is a bit messy.
If I had to title this post, I might name it, “Optimizing College Activities for a Future Programmer”.
I’m a college student at an American school. It’s quite a lot of work—more than I can do in the time given, and I have a study routine that’s more efficient than a lot of people I know. I was handling it relatively well last year and still getting enough sleep, exercise, socializing, etc. -- basically all the things I would consider essential for keeping me sane.
I do not do drugs. I do not watch television or movies. I am vegetarian. My room is not decorated and I do not buy expensive items. My socializing thus far has consisted of talking with people over meals while walking around campus. I am not in a relationship. I spend most of my time studying and doing school assignments. I have a relatively good GPA and have worked hard to maintain it. But the work is getting harder and I’m thinking I’ll need to start putting less work into my classes and accept a lower GPA, because I cannot compromise the essentials (meditation, sleep, etc.). It’s been too stressful to do as much coursework as I’ve been doing and to skip the essentials.
I plan to pursue a career in software engineering / outside academia. I’m double-majoring in math and CS. I do not plan to get a master’s degree or a PhD (at least, not any time soon). I understand that CS students’ grades don’t matter much, though I do think I can benefit from doing as well as I can in my classes. (But I’m also willing to work less in college to be happy.) I also have a great coding job that I’ve been neglecting because of my studies, but I don’t want to neglect it any longer.
Some questions:
Should I let my grades drop a bit and instead work my coding job and ensure I’m doing the “life essentials” on a daily basis? I will be replacing some of my academic work with programming, which is in my estimation pretty valuable. I’m on a scholarship and it requires that I maintain at least a 2.0 GPA, but I’m quite confident my GPA isn’t in danger of dropping that low.
Should I put more emphasis on socializing and forming a network? I don’t use Facebook much, and my interests don’t intersect with most of my peers’ (see the partying / drinking / buying expensive food stuff above). I’d rather spend time with people who are doing interesting things and who I can relate more with (is this bad?), but I’m having trouble finding such people on my campus. How do other “rationalists” form social networks in these kinds of environments, or do they?.. I don’t want to miss out on something essential (like developing social skills and / or a network) if it is actually essential. (To be fair, I am a bit awkward and often find I don’t have anything to say to my peers, but I think this is again because my interests differ from others’… But maybe I’m wrong.)
How should one pursue the development of social skills? How much time should one put into it, vs. into coding, studying, etc.? Based on what I’ve read, being friendly and someone people can get along with and want to spend time with can work wonders in all sorts of circumstances. Relative to my peers, I’ve put less time into meeting and hanging out with people, and I think I’m less socially adept. I’d love to improve. Any suggestions?
On a related note, how can I find people with whom I’m compatible? I frequently run into people I don’t want to spend time with, but rarely do I meet people whose presence electrifies me.
Any other general advice? e.g., I haven’t read anything outside of class since the summer, and I’m thinking it would be good to read during the semester.
I have two pieces of advice for you. Please take them with a grain of salt—this is merely my opinion and I am by no means an expert in the matter. Note that I can’t really recommend that you do things one way or another, but I thought I would bring up some points that could be salient.
1) When thinking about the coding job, don’t put a lot of emphasis on the monetary component unless you seriously need the money. You are probably earning less than you would be in a full time job, and your time is really valuable at the moment. On the other hand, if you need the money immediately or are interested in the job primarily because of networking opportunities or career advancement, then it is a different matter.
2) Keeping up a good GPA is not equivalent to learning the material well. There are certainly corners you could cut which would reduce the amount of work you need to do without losing much of the educational benefit. As the saying goes, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the results. If you are pressed for time, you may need to accept that some of your work will have to be “good enough” and not your personal best. Having said that, be very careful here, cause this is also an easy way to undermine yourself. “This isn’t really the important stuff” is a fully general excuse.
I’m having trouble finding the original sequence post that mentions it, but a “fully general excuse” refers to an excuse that can be applied to anything, independently of the truth value of the thing. In this case, what I mean is that “this isn’t really the important stuff” can sound reasonable even when applied to the stuff that actually is important (especially if you don’t think about it too long). It follows that if you accept that as a valid excuse but don’t keep an eye on your behavior, you may find yourself labeling whatever you don’t want to do at the moment as “not really important”—which leads to important work not getting done.
My advice would be to get just a minor in Math so you can get some easy electives in. if you’re considering a career change out of computer science as a possibility and just creating options then there are very few grad schools that would accept a math major but not a math minor. In the job market, a CS plus math minor is probably not going to be a big difference from a double major. This may not be the case for all possibilities but it should hold for most of them. Certainly most employers are going to compliment you then shrug for programming jobs.
A high GPA is somewhat helpful when you’re looking for your first full-time programming job, but probably not as helpful as how prestigious a school you went to, and definitely not as helpful as industry experience or actual nuts-and-bolts engineering skill. This latter is not to be underestimated; a lot of new CS grads can’t quickly write accurate pseudocode, for example, and you will be asked to do that at some point during any half-decent interview. If you can’t do it, that’s going to be a deal-breaker, but having a 3.2 instead of a 3.5 GPA almost certainly won’t be.
After a couple years of full-time experience, almost no one will ask about your GPA (they will, however, ask where you went to school and what degree you got), meaning that GPA is important to your long-term career prospects almost entirely insofar as it affects your standing right out of college. It’ll also affect your prospects for grad school, if you’re interested in going that direction at some point.
I can’t stress this strongly enough. I’m an engineer at Google, and do a lot of interviews here.
The hiring decision is based on interview performance, estimates of where you should be—based on history, age, etc.—and such things. It is not at all based on GPA. GPAs are only important inasmuch as it might get you past the first bar of getting to an interview at all, something you can automatically bypass by having someone who already works for Google recommend you, as well as a couple other ways. Personally, I was headhunted over IRC; my GPAs never came up at all, and they didn’t ask for a copy of my transcript until after I’d already signed a hiring contract.
This is, of course, not true for all companies—but I do think it’s true for the better ones. In short, actual skill is what matters.
Before you do anything else, reconsider your class schedule. A higher GPA will probably mean more to your future career prospects than keeping the math major. Also, balance your schedule so you have a mix of lower-work/more-gently-graded classes and harder classes every semester.
Consider dropping the job depending on the criteria ChaosMote noted.
Your lifestyle sounds pretty sterile. You should make an effort to socialize more. College can be a place you make friends who last a lifetime, if you put some effort in.
One major is enough; many companies look at GPA and a low GPA can rule you out but no second major won’t. The GPA/more classes pareto curve is also usually more favorable towards one major. But if it’s a very small commitment for OP my advice doesn’t stand.
What kind of effort?
Talk to people, be friendly, stay in touch, initiate social activities, be a good friend.
my interests don’t intersect with most of my peers’ (see the partying / drinking / buying expensive food stuff above). I’d rather spend time with people who are doing interesting things and who I can relate more with (is this bad?), but I’m having trouble finding such people on my campus.
All your suggestion are good, but it’s not worthwhile to put lots of energy in building friendships with people that you don’t like.
College can be a place you make friends who last a lifetime, if you put some effort in.
I wound up not liking anyone I met at the University of Tulsa. But then I had to transfer there after three semesters at a real university—Washington University in St. Louis. Imagine going from just below Ivy League to a place which, according to a Wikipedia page, has only one notable alum with a STEM degree from there, compared to dozens of alumni in areas like entertainment, business and sports:
I’m unsure this is the right decision for me, given that I don’t particularly enjoy partying or drinking. Why did you join a frat? What did you get out of it?
On this note: did your social skills improve after joining?
… And, more generally, how should one pursue the development of social skills? How much time should one put into it, vs. into coding, studying, etc.? Based on what I’ve read, being friendly and someone people can get along with and want to spend time with can work wonders in all sorts of circumstances. Relative to my peers, I’ve put less time into meeting and hanging out with people, and I think I’m less socially adept.
This is something I’d love to get better at.* Any suggestions?
*That, and finding people with whom I’m compatible. I frequently run into people I don’t want to spend time with, but rarely do I meet people whose presence electrifies me.
I don’t know. I mean, how can you measure your own social skills? You might think you have a bunch of friends, but what if they are just laughing behind your back? No way to know. I don’t think my social skills particularly improved during my time at Psi U, but they were fine going in.
I’ve got nothing on how one should pursue the development of social skills. Maybe make it a practice to meet a new peer group every couple of months? Part time jobs are great for this. I don’t know, seems like there’s got to be information on how to be a people person out there, self help books and such. It feels like a common problem.
If he thinks that his workload will ramp up, now isn’t a great time to join, because he’ll have to spend a semester going through the pledge process.
I do highly recommend fraternities otherwise though—they’re a great network and place to meet friends, a good place to practice and develop social skills when interacting with the rest of the Greek system, have a lot of people focused on self-improvement, and they often take care of a lot of the overhead in college (by providing meals, laundry machines, a gym).
This being a good decision is of course contingent upon you actually liking the people in the fraternity as well as the particular attitude of the house in general. And if you’re not into the party scene or nights out on the town, it may not be a good cultural fit.
How many hours is your coding job? If it’s 10+ and they’ll allow you to reduce them, you could go for that—you’ll still get to list having x months of experience there on your CV, will still get that experience and network from it, but will have a bit more time.
Don’t cut into the basic time you need for the essentials of life—being stressed or sleep deprived etc. will only make you less productive and exacerbate the problem. You also don’t mention any hobbies—do you get regular exercise? I know this means more time spent, but if you don’t get much already even 20mins every other day will make you more alert and productive.
There are easier courses and harder courses—try to take easier ones (still meeting requirements) as long as they don’t conflict with your interests. You can ask classmates about which are easier/have better lecturers.
Prep for your classes in the holidays—before each year I’ll look at the syllabus of the courses I’m taking and look up each of the terms there, spending maybe 30mins on each getting a general idea of what’s involved. This means you’re not seeing it for the first time in class, which makes it way easier to learn and retain (less overall effort).
Also ask why is the work harder now? I often find work hard for one of a few reasons: either I don’t have the background, I’m tuning out of the lectures (because the lecturer is boring, because I already know most of it, or because I feel like I don’t know enough to understand it even if I tune in), the work is actually time-consuming but not hard and this registers as ‘hard’ because I don’t want to start it, or I have just a few problems/knowledge gaps and don’t have the resources (friends, lecturers, example problems) to turn to to fix them. Each one of these has a different way of fixing it—for example the last one, having friends in that class helps with immensely, because you can each fill in those little gaps for eachother. I find it useful in math particularly.
Finally, there will be people at your college that also hate partying/drinking/etc. I’ve been lucky, having a solid group of 7 friends pretty much since I started college, all of whom aren’t interesting in drinking or partying, have similar majors (a lot in IT) and are happy to just hang out between classes and chat/study with eachother. I’m not entirely sure how you can find these people other then persistence—if you’re looking to go flatting, perhaps look at flats that say they are ‘quiet’, if you’re doing group projects try to group up with the harder working members of your class etc. and then follow up with this—ask where they hang out when they’re not in class and if you can join them. If you find one or two people with similar outlook to you, you’ll tend to find a whole bunch, because their friends will be similar to them.
I was unsure where to post this question; let me know whether it merits its own thread. I also apologize if this post is a bit messy.
If I had to title this post, I might name it, “Optimizing College Activities for a Future Programmer”.
I’m a college student at an American school. It’s quite a lot of work—more than I can do in the time given, and I have a study routine that’s more efficient than a lot of people I know. I was handling it relatively well last year and still getting enough sleep, exercise, socializing, etc. -- basically all the things I would consider essential for keeping me sane.
I do not do drugs. I do not watch television or movies. I am vegetarian. My room is not decorated and I do not buy expensive items. My socializing thus far has consisted of talking with people over meals while walking around campus. I am not in a relationship. I spend most of my time studying and doing school assignments. I have a relatively good GPA and have worked hard to maintain it. But the work is getting harder and I’m thinking I’ll need to start putting less work into my classes and accept a lower GPA, because I cannot compromise the essentials (meditation, sleep, etc.). It’s been too stressful to do as much coursework as I’ve been doing and to skip the essentials.
I plan to pursue a career in software engineering / outside academia. I’m double-majoring in math and CS. I do not plan to get a master’s degree or a PhD (at least, not any time soon). I understand that CS students’ grades don’t matter much, though I do think I can benefit from doing as well as I can in my classes. (But I’m also willing to work less in college to be happy.) I also have a great coding job that I’ve been neglecting because of my studies, but I don’t want to neglect it any longer.
Some questions:
Should I let my grades drop a bit and instead work my coding job and ensure I’m doing the “life essentials” on a daily basis? I will be replacing some of my academic work with programming, which is in my estimation pretty valuable. I’m on a scholarship and it requires that I maintain at least a 2.0 GPA, but I’m quite confident my GPA isn’t in danger of dropping that low.
Should I put more emphasis on socializing and forming a network? I don’t use Facebook much, and my interests don’t intersect with most of my peers’ (see the partying / drinking / buying expensive food stuff above). I’d rather spend time with people who are doing interesting things and who I can relate more with (is this bad?), but I’m having trouble finding such people on my campus. How do other “rationalists” form social networks in these kinds of environments, or do they?.. I don’t want to miss out on something essential (like developing social skills and / or a network) if it is actually essential. (To be fair, I am a bit awkward and often find I don’t have anything to say to my peers, but I think this is again because my interests differ from others’… But maybe I’m wrong.)
How should one pursue the development of social skills? How much time should one put into it, vs. into coding, studying, etc.? Based on what I’ve read, being friendly and someone people can get along with and want to spend time with can work wonders in all sorts of circumstances. Relative to my peers, I’ve put less time into meeting and hanging out with people, and I think I’m less socially adept. I’d love to improve. Any suggestions?
On a related note, how can I find people with whom I’m compatible? I frequently run into people I don’t want to spend time with, but rarely do I meet people whose presence electrifies me.
Any other general advice? e.g., I haven’t read anything outside of class since the summer, and I’m thinking it would be good to read during the semester.
I have two pieces of advice for you. Please take them with a grain of salt—this is merely my opinion and I am by no means an expert in the matter. Note that I can’t really recommend that you do things one way or another, but I thought I would bring up some points that could be salient.
1) When thinking about the coding job, don’t put a lot of emphasis on the monetary component unless you seriously need the money. You are probably earning less than you would be in a full time job, and your time is really valuable at the moment. On the other hand, if you need the money immediately or are interested in the job primarily because of networking opportunities or career advancement, then it is a different matter.
2) Keeping up a good GPA is not equivalent to learning the material well. There are certainly corners you could cut which would reduce the amount of work you need to do without losing much of the educational benefit. As the saying goes, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the results. If you are pressed for time, you may need to accept that some of your work will have to be “good enough” and not your personal best. Having said that, be very careful here, cause this is also an easy way to undermine yourself. “This isn’t really the important stuff” is a fully general excuse.
Thanks for the response.
Re: 1) I’m not as focused on the money as on the programming opportunities it might later lead to.
Re: 2) I agree with everything here. What do you mean in your last sentence?
I’m having trouble finding the original sequence post that mentions it, but a “fully general excuse” refers to an excuse that can be applied to anything, independently of the truth value of the thing. In this case, what I mean is that “this isn’t really the important stuff” can sound reasonable even when applied to the stuff that actually is important (especially if you don’t think about it too long). It follows that if you accept that as a valid excuse but don’t keep an eye on your behavior, you may find yourself labeling whatever you don’t want to do at the moment as “not really important”—which leads to important work not getting done.
The post is “Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People”. See also the wiki page on fully general counterarguments.
Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for.
My advice would be to get just a minor in Math so you can get some easy electives in. if you’re considering a career change out of computer science as a possibility and just creating options then there are very few grad schools that would accept a math major but not a math minor. In the job market, a CS plus math minor is probably not going to be a big difference from a double major. This may not be the case for all possibilities but it should hold for most of them. Certainly most employers are going to compliment you then shrug for programming jobs.
A high GPA is somewhat helpful when you’re looking for your first full-time programming job, but probably not as helpful as how prestigious a school you went to, and definitely not as helpful as industry experience or actual nuts-and-bolts engineering skill. This latter is not to be underestimated; a lot of new CS grads can’t quickly write accurate pseudocode, for example, and you will be asked to do that at some point during any half-decent interview. If you can’t do it, that’s going to be a deal-breaker, but having a 3.2 instead of a 3.5 GPA almost certainly won’t be.
After a couple years of full-time experience, almost no one will ask about your GPA (they will, however, ask where you went to school and what degree you got), meaning that GPA is important to your long-term career prospects almost entirely insofar as it affects your standing right out of college. It’ll also affect your prospects for grad school, if you’re interested in going that direction at some point.
I can’t stress this strongly enough. I’m an engineer at Google, and do a lot of interviews here.
The hiring decision is based on interview performance, estimates of where you should be—based on history, age, etc.—and such things. It is not at all based on GPA. GPAs are only important inasmuch as it might get you past the first bar of getting to an interview at all, something you can automatically bypass by having someone who already works for Google recommend you, as well as a couple other ways. Personally, I was headhunted over IRC; my GPAs never came up at all, and they didn’t ask for a copy of my transcript until after I’d already signed a hiring contract.
This is, of course, not true for all companies—but I do think it’s true for the better ones. In short, actual skill is what matters.
Before you do anything else, reconsider your class schedule. A higher GPA will probably mean more to your future career prospects than keeping the math major. Also, balance your schedule so you have a mix of lower-work/more-gently-graded classes and harder classes every semester.
Consider dropping the job depending on the criteria ChaosMote noted.
Your lifestyle sounds pretty sterile. You should make an effort to socialize more. College can be a place you make friends who last a lifetime, if you put some effort in.
What leads you to think this?
What kind of effort?
One major is enough; many companies look at GPA and a low GPA can rule you out but no second major won’t. The GPA/more classes pareto curve is also usually more favorable towards one major. But if it’s a very small commitment for OP my advice doesn’t stand.
Talk to people, be friendly, stay in touch, initiate social activities, be a good friend.
I think you’re missing,
All your suggestion are good, but it’s not worthwhile to put lots of energy in building friendships with people that you don’t like.
I wound up not liking anyone I met at the University of Tulsa. But then I had to transfer there after three semesters at a real university—Washington University in St. Louis. Imagine going from just below Ivy League to a place which, according to a Wikipedia page, has only one notable alum with a STEM degree from there, compared to dozens of alumni in areas like entertainment, business and sports:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Tulsa_people
Versus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Washington_University_alumni
Could you join a fraternity? Best decision I made while in college.
I’m unsure this is the right decision for me, given that I don’t particularly enjoy partying or drinking. Why did you join a frat? What did you get out of it?
Also the German name suggests European location which means that fraternities are pretty much dead around here.
The rent is extremely low, and the connections that I made there were valuable. I got my first job from a brother.
On this note: did your social skills improve after joining?
… And, more generally, how should one pursue the development of social skills? How much time should one put into it, vs. into coding, studying, etc.? Based on what I’ve read, being friendly and someone people can get along with and want to spend time with can work wonders in all sorts of circumstances. Relative to my peers, I’ve put less time into meeting and hanging out with people, and I think I’m less socially adept.
This is something I’d love to get better at.* Any suggestions?
*That, and finding people with whom I’m compatible. I frequently run into people I don’t want to spend time with, but rarely do I meet people whose presence electrifies me.
It’s literally practice. Practice basic social skills like telling stories, listening, and relating, and practice getting into a social state.
I don’t know. I mean, how can you measure your own social skills? You might think you have a bunch of friends, but what if they are just laughing behind your back? No way to know. I don’t think my social skills particularly improved during my time at Psi U, but they were fine going in.
I’ve got nothing on how one should pursue the development of social skills. Maybe make it a practice to meet a new peer group every couple of months? Part time jobs are great for this. I don’t know, seems like there’s got to be information on how to be a people person out there, self help books and such. It feels like a common problem.
If he thinks that his workload will ramp up, now isn’t a great time to join, because he’ll have to spend a semester going through the pledge process.
I do highly recommend fraternities otherwise though—they’re a great network and place to meet friends, a good place to practice and develop social skills when interacting with the rest of the Greek system, have a lot of people focused on self-improvement, and they often take care of a lot of the overhead in college (by providing meals, laundry machines, a gym).
This being a good decision is of course contingent upon you actually liking the people in the fraternity as well as the particular attitude of the house in general. And if you’re not into the party scene or nights out on the town, it may not be a good cultural fit.
How many hours is your coding job? If it’s 10+ and they’ll allow you to reduce them, you could go for that—you’ll still get to list having x months of experience there on your CV, will still get that experience and network from it, but will have a bit more time.
Don’t cut into the basic time you need for the essentials of life—being stressed or sleep deprived etc. will only make you less productive and exacerbate the problem. You also don’t mention any hobbies—do you get regular exercise? I know this means more time spent, but if you don’t get much already even 20mins every other day will make you more alert and productive.
There are easier courses and harder courses—try to take easier ones (still meeting requirements) as long as they don’t conflict with your interests. You can ask classmates about which are easier/have better lecturers.
Prep for your classes in the holidays—before each year I’ll look at the syllabus of the courses I’m taking and look up each of the terms there, spending maybe 30mins on each getting a general idea of what’s involved. This means you’re not seeing it for the first time in class, which makes it way easier to learn and retain (less overall effort).
Also ask why is the work harder now? I often find work hard for one of a few reasons: either I don’t have the background, I’m tuning out of the lectures (because the lecturer is boring, because I already know most of it, or because I feel like I don’t know enough to understand it even if I tune in), the work is actually time-consuming but not hard and this registers as ‘hard’ because I don’t want to start it, or I have just a few problems/knowledge gaps and don’t have the resources (friends, lecturers, example problems) to turn to to fix them. Each one of these has a different way of fixing it—for example the last one, having friends in that class helps with immensely, because you can each fill in those little gaps for eachother. I find it useful in math particularly.
Finally, there will be people at your college that also hate partying/drinking/etc. I’ve been lucky, having a solid group of 7 friends pretty much since I started college, all of whom aren’t interesting in drinking or partying, have similar majors (a lot in IT) and are happy to just hang out between classes and chat/study with eachother. I’m not entirely sure how you can find these people other then persistence—if you’re looking to go flatting, perhaps look at flats that say they are ‘quiet’, if you’re doing group projects try to group up with the harder working members of your class etc. and then follow up with this—ask where they hang out when they’re not in class and if you can join them. If you find one or two people with similar outlook to you, you’ll tend to find a whole bunch, because their friends will be similar to them.