I sometimes wonder if I should have dropped out of my Philosophy BA when I realised that roughly 3 students in my year had a serious interest in philosophy.
If I had done that I wouldn’t have ended up going on study exchange to Iceland and writing on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
I had a great time with all that. But it was 2010 and arguably I should have been on LessWrong waiting for Gwern to post about Bitcoin. And applying to Oxbridge, and/or Y Combinator.
I studied Philosophy at a second-tier university (neither Oxbridge, nor the best London options). I had a great time but in hindsight I should have taken an “Oxbridge, LSE or bust” strategy. That’s the advice I’d give my younger self.
In fact my 17 year old self applied for neither Oxbridge nor LSE because I didn’t like the vibes of Oxbridge and I didn’t want to live in London. Not crazy, but if I’d had concepts like social capital, selection effects and signalling on my radar, I would have surely made a different call. I see this as one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I’m very happy with how things are working out, and I rarely think about this. But if I do stop and reflect, I wonder what might have been.
I have a cousin who completed 1 year at one American university, but found the academic standards unacceptably low. They dropped out and switched to another course at another university. They just completed the first year of that. The decision to switch looked good ex ante and looks excellent, ex post.
It was a difficult decision partly because (if I understand correctly—I still can’t really believe this) the original terms of their study grant included a clause about not dropping out of the first university, on pain of a major financial penalty.
I sometimes wonder if I should have dropped out of my Philosophy BA when I realised that roughly 3 students in my year had a serious interest in philosophy.
If I had done that I wouldn’t have ended up going on study exchange to Iceland and writing on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
I had a great time with all that. But it was 2010 and arguably I should have been on LessWrong waiting for Gwern to post about Bitcoin. And applying to Oxbridge, and/or Y Combinator.
I studied Philosophy at a second-tier university (neither Oxbridge, nor the best London options). I had a great time but in hindsight I should have taken an “Oxbridge, LSE or bust” strategy. That’s the advice I’d give my younger self.
In fact my 17 year old self applied for neither Oxbridge nor LSE because I didn’t like the vibes of Oxbridge and I didn’t want to live in London. Not crazy, but if I’d had concepts like social capital, selection effects and signalling on my radar, I would have surely made a different call. I see this as one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I’m very happy with how things are working out, and I rarely think about this. But if I do stop and reflect, I wonder what might have been.
I have a cousin who completed 1 year at one American university, but found the academic standards unacceptably low. They dropped out and switched to another course at another university. They just completed the first year of that. The decision to switch looked good ex ante and looks excellent, ex post.
It was a difficult decision partly because (if I understand correctly—I still can’t really believe this) the original terms of their study grant included a clause about not dropping out of the first university, on pain of a major financial penalty.