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Comment on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I drop out of college to do a startup?

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As someone else on this site said once, getting into college in the first place is actually more influential on the rest of your life than graduating. You can always go back.

Then again, college is to a certain extent what you make of it. You have opportunities there that you're unlikely to get again. Another option you should consider is changing majors. Astronomy or Egyptology or something that's just interesting with little or no direct practical application. After all, you've already got the skills you need to earn a living.

I'm a CS and math major already, but I'm at a liberal arts college. I've learnt a lot forcing myself to write english literature papers, but I think I'd have fared better, academically, if I just went to MIT.

MIT has compulsory English Lit etc too, AFAIK.

Oh. Well, I know nothing about MIT. I was discouraged from applying there because they don't have good financial aid - for international students. It turns out I'm not international after all, but who knew.

I quite liked english literature, actually. I just like hacking more... much more.

The thing is: I find liberal arts a very good idea, almost in the stereotypical way. I think by comparing perspectives, and doing lots of different disciplines seeds one's mind with lots of different ways of looking.

Maybe you should have gone to college in England. 3 year Bachelors programmes, but you pretty much do only what you're majoring in, which you decide in advance (i.e. when you're still in high school, which we call 6th Form). I did Mech Eng and I think we had the option of doing one course a year (out of 6-8 courses/year total) outside the department, and quite a few people didn't even do that.

Yup - I've heard that I would have liked Oxbridge very much. Apparently they just give you the syllabus and a reading list and meet you once a week to keep you on track? If I had known that when I was choosing colleges, I'd have jumped at it immediately.

I didn't consider the English system (though I'm somewhat a product of it) since I didn't want to specialize. It turns out not specializing was more excruciatingly difficult than I thought it would be, so now I'm deciding whether to run in the opposite direction.

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