“If you actually have that better thing lined up, I think it’s a pretty straightforward decision. If you don’t, it’s a lot tougher to predict whether it exists.”
Great point. If you can support yourself with a full-time paid job at Poetic or another organization, you can feel confident and secure leaving school for a while. Also, you don’t have to “drop out” — you can take a semester or two or four off, and your university is very likely to readmit you if you decide to go back to school.
I dropped out of college after my freshman year to work at a startup. It was a great experience and I’m glad I did it. After about two years, I realized I needed more formal training in CS and ML in order to move from industry data science to AI safety and other more difficult career paths. I transferred to a new school that is much better socially and academically than my first school, with a much better sense of my academic goals.
You can find a stable, respectable option for leaving school and preserving optionality to return. Introspective Systems already sounds like that option (send them an email!). Other startups would probably hire you, you can send emails to YC founders to find out. EA orgs and funding are more difficult in my experience, but you might have better luck. Finally, with all the respect in the world for attempting ambitious work in an important field, I would caution against pinning too much on Poetic. Undergraduates very rarely found successful startups, even less so in research-intensive industries dominated by PhDs such as NLP. If you find somebody older and more experienced who’s doing something you’d like to do, you can put school on hold while safely preserving optionality to return.
“If you actually have that better thing lined up, I think it’s a pretty straightforward decision. If you don’t, it’s a lot tougher to predict whether it exists.”
Great point. If you can support yourself with a full-time paid job at Poetic or another organization, you can feel confident and secure leaving school for a while. Also, you don’t have to “drop out” — you can take a semester or two or four off, and your university is very likely to readmit you if you decide to go back to school.
I dropped out of college after my freshman year to work at a startup. It was a great experience and I’m glad I did it. After about two years, I realized I needed more formal training in CS and ML in order to move from industry data science to AI safety and other more difficult career paths. I transferred to a new school that is much better socially and academically than my first school, with a much better sense of my academic goals.
You can find a stable, respectable option for leaving school and preserving optionality to return. Introspective Systems already sounds like that option (send them an email!). Other startups would probably hire you, you can send emails to YC founders to find out. EA orgs and funding are more difficult in my experience, but you might have better luck. Finally, with all the respect in the world for attempting ambitious work in an important field, I would caution against pinning too much on Poetic. Undergraduates very rarely found successful startups, even less so in research-intensive industries dominated by PhDs such as NLP. If you find somebody older and more experienced who’s doing something you’d like to do, you can put school on hold while safely preserving optionality to return.