Everyone has their own path, but broadly speaking I would say that avoiding social opportunities at college was not to your benefit. I, for one, learned almost nothing at college that I couldn't have picked up myself with a few hours of before-bed reading sessions. The social experience was the value.
It might depend on the college, and how it feeds into the industry you wind up in.
Mine was a Large Cow College -- the U of MD -- whose CS department seemed to feed into the Washington, DC government and defense contractor businesses. When I relocated to Silicon Valley, all of my contacts were useless.
Well, there was the Arpanet; I'd been exchanging email with some Atari enthusiasts at Stanford for a while, and wound up going to dinner and users group meetings with them a few times.
But Silly Valley was (and probably still is) a terrible place for a geek to try to learn to be social. I'll probably do a blog post about that some day.
Comments
Everyone has their own path, but broadly speaking I would say that avoiding social opportunities at college was not to your benefit. I, for one, learned almost nothing at college that I couldn't have picked up myself with a few hours of before-bed reading sessions. The social experience was the value.
It might depend on the college, and how it feeds into the industry you wind up in.
Mine was a Large Cow College -- the U of MD -- whose CS department seemed to feed into the Washington, DC government and defense contractor businesses. When I relocated to Silicon Valley, all of my contacts were useless.
Well, there was the Arpanet; I'd been exchanging email with some Atari enthusiasts at Stanford for a while, and wound up going to dinner and users group meetings with them a few times.
But Silly Valley was (and probably still is) a terrible place for a geek to try to learn to be social. I'll probably do a blog post about that some day.