My two cents as someone who burned out with a full depressive episode in their junior year of an electrical engineering degree and managed to limp all the way to graduation:
Don’t underestimate the magnitude of what can go wrong in your head. I’ve got some genetic factors and some childhood stuff that likely contributed, but anxiety and depression can and will cripple you for years if you let them.
Get a blood test at your earliest convenience; make sure that you’re not low on vitamin B12 or D, or have anything else obviously wrong. I’ve heard enough stories about things like this (and had deficiencies myself) that indicate this is high-value. It’s also not hard to do or expensive (just ask your family doctor or the University Health Center; make sure to specify that you’re curious about those deficiencies in particular).
Don’t fall for false dichotomies. You’re clearly smart enough to get creative.
One suggestion I’ve seen in this thread is taking a semester/year off to go work, which your University should be fine with.
Another suggestion, if you believe there is inherent value in a degree, is to Goodhart the degree itself. Read this—you can consciously engage in half-assing your degree with everything you’ve got. In other words, diplomas don’t include grades. In other other words, Cs get degrees. Feel free to put in the absolute minimum that has you passing, take the easiest electives, etc., and spend the time you get back on other things.
Once you’ve had your first job, no one cares where you got your degree from. Spending 55k per year is absurd—transfer to a cheaper college, or take a look at your local community college. Most community colleges will have an agreement with four-year colleges for credits to transfer. Drop out and enroll there, get the freshman/sophomore/core credits over with, then transition to a cheaper/online college for the degree. You can also take this slowly—one community college class a semester can be done simultaneously with a full-time job, if you’re so inclined, and most four-year colleges will have something for people with jobs.
Reframe the question: if you’ve got three years left, each costing 55k, then would you willingly take 165k right now to walk away? Would that 165k be worth more to you than an additional three years of education at college?
I honestly don’t believe that student loan debt is ever worth it, especially not for programmers. Doctors maybe, but that’s about it. Whatever you do, plan out how you’re going to wind up debt-free at the end. Scholarships are great. So is working. Debt isn’t.
Isn’t MIT’s entire curriculum online? Is there anything you can realistically gain from your current university that you can’t get yourself in other ways? Is the alumni network super valuable? Is there an incubator you could take advantage of?
And a couple of general decision-helpers I like to use:
It’s twenty years later, and you’re looking back on your life. What will you regret not having done more, finishing your degree or striking out on your own?
Take out a fair coin. Heads you get the degree, tails you walk away. Flip the coin, and pay attention to how you feel. Are you hoping for a specific result? Will you be disappointed with a different result? The face the coin lands on is irrelevant. In the moment it was in the air, spinning, what did you want it to land on?
You are considering Deviating from The Path. Deviating from The Path invites risk, not only of failure, but of scorn. Look at the dropout, they’ll whisper as you pass. I guess he didn’t know better than us after all. Too bad, really. He had a good thing and lost it. Can you endure that? Do you care? Does it matter to you, if that’s what people think? Remember that dissent feels like wearing a clown suit.
Humans are loss-averse. Tip the scales slightly in favor of the riskier option, knowing that you’re in a profession where the worst you’ll do is still better than most of the people who have ever lived.
Do a pre-mortem: you drop out, do your startup, and fail. You apply to the company you mentioned and are rejected. You’ve left college and you’ve got no job, no startup, no hope. What went wrong? What can you do now to lower the probability that it will go wrong, or to soften the blow when it does?
True. But if you ever decide to go for a PhD, you’ll need good grades to get in. If you’ll want to do research (you mentioned alignment research there?), you’ll need a publication track record. For some career paths, pushing through depression is no better than dropping out.
I suspect (without any real evidence) that the publication track record is more important than the grades, if graduate school or a doctorate is the goal. A C average undergrad with last authorship on a couple of great papers seems to me to look better than a straight-A student without any authorship, although I’ve no idea if it works that way in practice.
if you believe there is inherent value in a degree, is to Goodhart the degree itself
This (and the whole false dichotomy point). There is a large difference between an education and a diploma. A piece of paper saying you had a higher education can often be useful, so it’s worth having (e.g. a work visa in many countries), but is pretty much fungible in most cases. Unless you value the defense contractor job and/or don’t have any other experience...
The current programming market seems to value practical skills a lot more than where you went to university—pretty much what Dave5 said. I also agree with Pro in that if this suddenly changes because of AI, you’ll probably have much bigger problems.
An education, though—that’s valuable. I have the impression that the better people that I worked with tend to have gotten at least an undergraduate level and usually more. Most subjects aren’t that useful, but they give you an overview of the whole field, which is valuable when encountering new problems.
My two cents as someone who burned out with a full depressive episode in their junior year of an electrical engineering degree and managed to limp all the way to graduation:
Don’t underestimate the magnitude of what can go wrong in your head. I’ve got some genetic factors and some childhood stuff that likely contributed, but anxiety and depression can and will cripple you for years if you let them.
Get a blood test at your earliest convenience; make sure that you’re not low on vitamin B12 or D, or have anything else obviously wrong. I’ve heard enough stories about things like this (and had deficiencies myself) that indicate this is high-value. It’s also not hard to do or expensive (just ask your family doctor or the University Health Center; make sure to specify that you’re curious about those deficiencies in particular).
Don’t fall for false dichotomies. You’re clearly smart enough to get creative.
One suggestion I’ve seen in this thread is taking a semester/year off to go work, which your University should be fine with.
Another suggestion, if you believe there is inherent value in a degree, is to Goodhart the degree itself. Read this—you can consciously engage in half-assing your degree with everything you’ve got. In other words, diplomas don’t include grades. In other other words, Cs get degrees. Feel free to put in the absolute minimum that has you passing, take the easiest electives, etc., and spend the time you get back on other things.
Once you’ve had your first job, no one cares where you got your degree from. Spending 55k per year is absurd—transfer to a cheaper college, or take a look at your local community college. Most community colleges will have an agreement with four-year colleges for credits to transfer. Drop out and enroll there, get the freshman/sophomore/core credits over with, then transition to a cheaper/online college for the degree. You can also take this slowly—one community college class a semester can be done simultaneously with a full-time job, if you’re so inclined, and most four-year colleges will have something for people with jobs.
Reframe the question: if you’ve got three years left, each costing 55k, then would you willingly take 165k right now to walk away? Would that 165k be worth more to you than an additional three years of education at college?
I honestly don’t believe that student loan debt is ever worth it, especially not for programmers. Doctors maybe, but that’s about it. Whatever you do, plan out how you’re going to wind up debt-free at the end. Scholarships are great. So is working. Debt isn’t.
Isn’t MIT’s entire curriculum online? Is there anything you can realistically gain from your current university that you can’t get yourself in other ways? Is the alumni network super valuable? Is there an incubator you could take advantage of?
And a couple of general decision-helpers I like to use:
It’s twenty years later, and you’re looking back on your life. What will you regret not having done more, finishing your degree or striking out on your own?
Take out a fair coin. Heads you get the degree, tails you walk away. Flip the coin, and pay attention to how you feel. Are you hoping for a specific result? Will you be disappointed with a different result? The face the coin lands on is irrelevant. In the moment it was in the air, spinning, what did you want it to land on?
You are considering Deviating from The Path. Deviating from The Path invites risk, not only of failure, but of scorn. Look at the dropout, they’ll whisper as you pass. I guess he didn’t know better than us after all. Too bad, really. He had a good thing and lost it. Can you endure that? Do you care? Does it matter to you, if that’s what people think? Remember that dissent feels like wearing a clown suit.
Humans are loss-averse. Tip the scales slightly in favor of the riskier option, knowing that you’re in a profession where the worst you’ll do is still better than most of the people who have ever lived.
Do a pre-mortem: you drop out, do your startup, and fail. You apply to the company you mentioned and are rejected. You’ve left college and you’ve got no job, no startup, no hope. What went wrong? What can you do now to lower the probability that it will go wrong, or to soften the blow when it does?
Sleep on it.
Sleep on it again.
Read better advice than mine.
Good luck.
True. But if you ever decide to go for a PhD, you’ll need good grades to get in. If you’ll want to do research (you mentioned alignment research there?), you’ll need a publication track record. For some career paths, pushing through depression is no better than dropping out.
Also true.
I suspect (without any real evidence) that the publication track record is more important than the grades, if graduate school or a doctorate is the goal. A C average undergrad with last authorship on a couple of great papers seems to me to look better than a straight-A student without any authorship, although I’ve no idea if it works that way in practice.
This (and the whole false dichotomy point). There is a large difference between an education and a diploma. A piece of paper saying you had a higher education can often be useful, so it’s worth having (e.g. a work visa in many countries), but is pretty much fungible in most cases. Unless you value the defense contractor job and/or don’t have any other experience...
The current programming market seems to value practical skills a lot more than where you went to university—pretty much what Dave5 said. I also agree with Pro in that if this suddenly changes because of AI, you’ll probably have much bigger problems.
An education, though—that’s valuable. I have the impression that the better people that I worked with tend to have gotten at least an undergraduate level and usually more. Most subjects aren’t that useful, but they give you an overview of the whole field, which is valuable when encountering new problems.