More work on university essay

Author: colah

posts/2018-09-University/index.html

@@ -122,7 +122,7 @@ <h1>Do I Need to Go to University?</h1>
     because I think they’re riskier and depend a lot on the person.
     In fact, I suspect that many of the people who write to me would be well served by going to university.
     At the same time, I think alternative paths can be a great choice for some people
-    -- in some cases, a significantly better than going to university.
+    -- in some cases, significantly better than going to university.
   </p>
 
   <p>
@@ -147,11 +147,14 @@ <h2>Ways of Thinking about the Decision</h2>
 
   <p>
     My first suggestion is to compare university to concrete alternatives.
-    Instead of asking “Is university good?”, ask “Do I have something more compelling to do”?
-    Instead of “Should I do a PhD?”, ask “Where can I find the best environment to grow as a researcher?”
+    Instead of asking “Is university good?”, ask “Do I have something more compelling to do?”.
+    Instead of “Should I do a PhD?”, ask “Where can I find the best environment to grow as a researcher?”.
     And so forth.
-    Spending a year doing something else is almost always reversible,
-    so the most important question is whether it will be time well spent
+  </p>
+  <p>
+    Spending a year doing something else is almost always reversible:
+    if you end up wanting to go back to university, it was just a gap year.
+    As a result, the most important question is whether it will be time well spent
     and that requires you to think about what specifically you’ll be doing.
   </p>
 
@@ -186,23 +189,51 @@ <h2>Ways of Thinking about the Decision</h2>
     If it feels urgent, is the urgency for good reasons?
   </p>
 
+  <h2>Not Having a Degree</h2>
+
   <p>
-    Finally, it’s worth being aware of potential long-term consequences of not getting a degree, even if you do very well.
-    In some fields, if you can demonstrate an ability to do great work it will lead to career opportunities regardless of your credentials, but this isn’t equally true in all fields.
-    One useful test can be to look for examples of people who are successful without degrees.
+    It’s important to be aware that not having a degree can have several negative long-term consequences.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    University degrees have a lot of signalling and credentialing value.
+    They cheaply communicate to other individuals and organizations that you have some baseline skills (at least in theory).
+    In some fields, you can succeed without a degree by demonstrating skill in other ways (publications, open source projects, portfolios, talks, awards, work history, referrals, etc).
+    This works better in some fields than others.
+    One useful test can be to look for examples of people who are successful without degrees in your field.
     Even if your field is very good about this, you may wish to move into another field at some later point and run into challenges where your previous successes aren’t legable to the new field, or the new field is more credential focused.
   </p>
 
+  <p>
+    A related issue is that traditional credentials may be more important for some people than others, sadly.
+    If you are part of a group that society is less likely to perceive as skilled by default, it may be harder to do without the validation of a degree.
+    As a white male, I don't feel very qualified to give advice on this or even to what exent it is an issue.
+    There are certainly examples of people in under-represented groups being successful without a degree.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    There's also a weird flip side to all of this.
+    Once you establish yourself as competent there is this kind of threshold effect where not having a university degree can suddenly start causing people to actually take you more seriously.
+    This kind of countersignalling effect seems to be common when you do non-traditional things.
+    <!--(Geoff Hinton was, briefly, technically, an intern at Google when he started at Google Brain;
+    rather than make anyone think less of him, I think this actually causes people to think more positively of him, because no one doubts his expertise and he obviously doesn't have anything to prove.)-->
+  </p>
+
   <p>
     In addition to the direct career consequences, not having a degree can be a source of major immigration challenges.
     The version of this I’ve seen most often is people wanting to move to the US (usually the Bay Area) but being ineligible for most visas due to the lack of a degree.
-    (The solution to this is usually to get an “alien of extraordinary ability” O-1 visa, which doesn’t require a degree.
-    Unfortunately, this is a high bar to reach and even extremely talented and successful people often can’t get one at the beginning of their career.
-    If you expect to need to get one eventually, consult an immigration lawyer early on and start planning to build your case.)
+    If you think you may have this problem, try to do a short consultation with an immigration lawyer early: there may be things you can do to start building a case.
+    (For those immigrating to the US, the solution to this is usually to get an “alien of extraordinary ability” O-1 visa, which doesn’t require a degree but does require a lot of evidence of your accomplishments.)
   </p>
 
 
-  <h2>Emotional and Social Challenges</h2>
+  <!--<h2>Social Consequences</h2>
+
+  <p>
+    Another
+  </p>-->
+
+  <h2>Family Challenges</h2>
 
   <p>
     Unfortunately, even if you feel confident that you would be best served by taking a non-traditional path, many young people face significant social and emotional barriers to doing so, particularly from adults.
@@ -261,6 +292,55 @@ <h2>Emotional and Social Challenges</h2>
     I am not the right person to ask for advice on this.)
   </p>
 
+  <h2>Social Challenges</h2>
+
+  <p>
+    For many people, university is a period of social development.
+    They learn social skills, make long-term friends, and -- perhaps most critically -- form romantic relationships.
+    Arguably, this is the biggest benefit of university.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    Many precocious young adults who leave university have less friends their own age.
+    Does that mean that not going to university stunts social development?
+    It seems hard to tell to what extent it's actually <i>causal</i>.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    The challenge is that many of us <i>also</i> didn't connect that much with our peers in grade school.
+    For example, I was intensely bullied in elementary school, and while I had friends in high school, I wasn't that close to anyone.
+    In fact, until recently, the vast majority of my friends have been 5-10 years older than me.
+    Conversely, I have friends I'd put in the "precocious teenager" category who went to university but didn't seem to really make friends their own age, especially during their freshman year.
+    This confounding variable makes it tricky to know how much of a role going to university actually plays.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    My guesses is that the answer is a mixture of the two explanations:
+    not going to university both causes people to have less friends in their own age group, and it also correlates with it for other reasons.
+    Either way, I suspect some readers may find it hard to make friends among peers, regardless of their decision on university.
+    So it seems good to talk about a little bit.
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    I think that most of my friends being older than me growing up was fine.
+    Teenage-Chris had lots of deeply meaningful connections with older friends.
+    In several cases, they felt kind of like an older sibling.
+    And, as adults, my friends were often more emotionally mature, thoughtful, and principled than my teenage peers.
+    (I think if I now met someone like teenage-Chris I'd be concerned if they were also not forming friends outside their age group.)
+  </p>
+
+  <p>
+    The one place where I do think that not interacting with my peers was harmful is romantic relatinships.
+    Finding a partner seems like one of the most important things in life to me, and I got a late start to developing those skills.
+    This is a recurring story I hear from some of my friends, both male and female.
+    But I'm not sure that going to university would have helped.
+    Instead, I suspect the best strategy is to really deliberately invest energy in trying to meet people you might connect with.
+    Ask yourself, "where do I think people in my age group that I'd connect with would be?" and think hard about it.
+    Maybe there's a certain kind of meetup, or university club, or hackerspaces, etc.
+    Then push yourself to try going to lots of such things.
+  </p>
+
+
   <h2>Resources</h2>
 
 
@@ -295,11 +375,47 @@ <h3>Community / Learning:</h3>
 
     <li>
       <b>Conferences</b> -
+      Conferences can be a great opportunity to gain exposure to a research community and meet researchers.
       Academic conferences are almost always open to everyone, both to attend and submit papers.
       There's usually a fee to attend, which you may be able to get a student discount on, or volunteer to avoid.
       It's often the case that, while getting a paper in the main conference is quite competitive, getting a paper into one of the workshops isn't.
     </li>
 
+    <li>
+      <b>Online Communities</b> - There are often great public or semi-public online communities around different technical and research topics, if you look hard enough. These may be subreddits, facebook groups, StackExchanges, slack communities, mailing lists, IRC channels, Twitter, et cetera.
+      One heuristic is to go to events (conferences, meetups, etc) with the community you want to be involved in, and then find out where those people hang out.
+      This is especially useful because sometimes the best communities requie an invitation.
+
+      <ul>
+        <li>
+          Twitter can be
+          <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/719606290696269824">surpisnginly great</a>
+          if you carefully curate the people you follow.
+          A few of my favorite ML-focused accounts include
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/hardmaru">David Ha</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage">Miles Brundage</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane">Janelle Shane</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/zzznah">Alex Mordvintsev</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/maithra_raghu">Maithra Raghu</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffDean">Jeff Dean</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/catherineols">Catherine Ollson</a>,
+            and
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/timhwang">Tim Hwang</a>.
+
+          Some other accounts I find delightful are
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/devonzuegel">Devon Zuegel</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/albrgr">Alexander Berger</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/2plus2make5">Emma Pierson</a>,
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen">Michael Nielsen</a>,
+            and
+            <a href="https://twitter.com/juliagalef">Julia Galef</a>.
+
+          This is only a small slice optimized partly for variety -- there's lots of people I think are fantastic.
+          You can also follow <a href="https://twitter.com/ch402">me</a>, but obviously I'm biased on that.
+       </li>
+      </ul>
+    </li>
+
   </ul>
 
   <h3>Funding</h3>
@@ -322,9 +438,10 @@ <h3>Funding</h3>
     </li>
 
     <li>
-      <b><a href="http://www.1517fund.com/">1517</a></b> (15-17?) -
-      Mentorship, grants, and VC funding for young people taking a non-traditional path.
-      Founded by Danielle Strachman and Mike Gibson, who I both trust significantly.
+      <b><a href="http://www.1517fund.com/">1517</a></b> -
+      Mentorship, grants ($1K), and VC funding ($50K - $250K) for young people taking a non-traditional path.
+      Founded by Danielle Strachman and Mike Gibson, both of whom I trust significantly.
+      They were both on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship and have worked with younger makers for almost a decade.
     </li>
 
     <li>
@@ -366,9 +483,8 @@ <h3>Internships, Residencies, etc.</h3>
     <li>
       <b>Academic Internships</b> -
       Interning at an academic lab can be a great way to grow your skills in a discipline and become more connected to an academic community.
-      Academic internships are often much less competitive than industrial ones.
-      They're typically paid, but much less than industrial internships. Some are unpaid.
-      They tend to be less competitive than an analogous industrial internship.
+      Academic internships tend to be less competitive than an analogous industry internship (the typical academic intern is an undergrad student, while the typical intern in a good industry research group is a PhD student).
+      Some are unpaid, but most are paid -- just, a lot less than industy ones.
       It's often possible to apply without being a student.
       There may not be a formal application process.
       <ul>
@@ -379,16 +495,20 @@ <h3>Internships, Residencies, etc.</h3>
     </li>
 
     <li>
-      <b>Industrial Internships</b> -
+      <b>Industry Internships</b> -
       Interning at a company can also be a great way to learn and grow.
       It's typically better paid than an academic internship, often has a path to a full-time job, and good ones may give you access to more 1:1 mentorship or better resources to do your work.
       It's often possible to apply without being a student.
       <ul>
         <li>
           If you apply to a large company, there can be a lot of variability in what an internship is like.
           Often, the way to get a cool internship is networking, so that a team you want to work with will request you.
-          In research, this is often done by going to conferences in your topic and meeting industrial researchers who share your interests.
+          In research, this is often done by going to conferences in your topic and meeting industry researchers who share your interests.
          </li>
+         <li>
+           Internships at non-prestegious companies, or on less glamorous teams within a company, are also much less competitive.
+           They can be a good stepping stones towards a research career. (Also consider an academic internship.)
+          </li>
       </ul>
     </li>
 
@@ -417,10 +537,15 @@ <h3>Internships, Residencies, etc.</h3>
 
     <li>
       <b>Grad School</b> -
-      Doing a Masters or PhD can also be a great way to grow your skills, get mentorship, and engage with an academic community.
+      Doing a Master's or PhD can also be a great way to grow your skills, get mentorship, and engage with an academic community.
       PhDs in technical subjects like CS are typically paid, covering the cost of the program and giving you a stipend to live on.
       In some cases, it may not be that different from doing a long internship.
-      While challenging, it is possible to get admitted to grad school without an undergrad degree.
+      <ul>
+        <li>
+          While challenging, it is often possible to get admitted to grad school without an undergrad degree if you have other accomplishments.
+          This usually invovles a professor really wanting to have someone as a student and advocating for them.
+      </ul>
+
     </li>
   </ul>
 
@@ -435,7 +560,7 @@ <h2>Cold Emailing Researchers</h2>
   <ul>
     <li>
       <b>Be polite.</b>
-      In general, when reaching out to people, thing will work better if you are thoughtful, courteous, and polite.
+      In general, when reaching out to people, things will work better if you are thoughtful, courteous, and polite.
    </li>
    <li>
      <b>Be mindful that people are busy.</b>
@@ -450,6 +575,9 @@ <h2>Cold Emailing Researchers</h2>
         Could a less busy person help you equally?
         For example, if you want to ask someone questions, could you ask a grad student instead of a famous professor?
       </li>
+      <li>
+        Please don't act like you have an automatic right or are entitled to someone's time.
+      </li>
     </ul>
    </li>
    <li>
@@ -461,13 +589,19 @@ <h2>Cold Emailing Researchers</h2>
    <li>
      <b>Understand the researcher or group.</b>
      At least skim through their recent papers and ideally read a few that align with your interests more carefully.
-     Think about how your interests connect to these.
-     (This mostly applies to visiting or seeking internships.)
+     Showing that you've invested energy in undestanding the person you're reaching out to is one of the most positive signals you can give.
+     If you're looking to visit or intern with a group, think about how your interests connect to theirs.
+   </li>
+   <li>
+     <b>Adjust for Impostor Syndrome?</b>
+     My personal experience is that I both get lots of blatant spam emails (eg. "do my homework for me") <i>and</i> find out that many people who I'd really want to email (eg. seriously thought about one of my papers and want to talk) are hesitant to do so.
+     I've particularly noticed that the average quality of emails from junior women is much higher than the average, and suspect that they are typically applying a much higher threshold for reaching out.
+     I don't know how to help you adjust for this, but if you're worrying about reaching out you should probably update positively that it's more likely you should.
    </li>
    <li>
      <b>Example:</b>
      One of the most important emails I've written was a cold email to Yoshua Bengio in 2013.
-     I spent more than week writing it.
+     I spent more than a week writing it.
      This included reading many of his recent papers and thinking a lot about where our interests overlapped.
      The final email was only a few paragraphs.
    </li>
@@ -491,7 +625,7 @@ <h2>Acknowledgments</h2>
   Leigh Honeywell, Rob Gilson, Nicholas Dodds, Kate Murphy, Jade Bilkey, Eric Boyd, Madison Kelly, Alex Leitch, Paul Wouters, Sen Nordstrom and Alaina Hardie.
   I'm also grateful to many professors at the University of Toronto for allowing me to audit courses as a high school student, and then giving me permission to take advanced courses in my one year there.
   Related to this, I'm lucky that Brad Bass gave me a summer job doing programming at his lab in grade 10 and 11 -- I think I wasn't very useful, but spending months programming full time was great.
-  Too many other played supported me for me to really have any hope of mentioning all of them, but to make an attempt:
+  Too many other people supported me for me to really have any hope of mentioning everyone, but to list some of them:
   Jen Dodd, Peter Salus,
   Yomna Nasser,
   Shai Maharaj,
@@ -502,6 +636,9 @@ <h2>Acknowledgments</h2>
 </p>
 
 
+<p>
+  Thanks as well to all those who commented on drafts of this essay including Zan Armstrong, Tom Reid, Deborah Raji, Ria Cheruvu, Emil Wallner, Ali Zaidi, and Danielle Strachman.
+</p>
 
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