It’s not so much the “being surrounded by smart people,” in my experience (though that has certainly been one of the great blessings of my life), but the “if I am interested in X, I can easily find someone who is as smart as I am who has already spent some time thinking about something enough like X that i can pick their brains and quickly prune the tree of false starts.”
Professors can serve that role if you can engage with them, which some people are better at than others. I was bad at it as an undergrad, but I had peers who did it successfully.
That said, Wei_Dai’s point about using the Internet is a good one; I am old enough that that wasn’t quite an option in the same way it is now, and the modern world might really be importantly different in that way. (Can I just say how much I love living in the future?) This just might not be as much of an issue as it used to be.
It’s not so much the “being surrounded by smart people,” in my experience (though that has certainly been one of the great blessings of my life), but the “if I am interested in X, I can easily find someone who is as smart as I am who has already spent some time thinking about something enough like X that i can pick their brains and quickly prune the tree of false starts.”
Professors can serve that role if you can engage with them, which some people are better at than others. I was bad at it as an undergrad, but I had peers who did it successfully.
That said, Wei_Dai’s point about using the Internet is a good one; I am old enough that that wasn’t quite an option in the same way it is now, and the modern world might really be importantly different in that way. (Can I just say how much I love living in the future?) This just might not be as much of an issue as it used to be.