I spent my 20s trying to get rich enough to become a professional student. My 30s too. Its looking like this is also how I'll spend my 50s, which are approaching like a steam train. Bring on the MIT Golden Years Home for the Intellectually Dissatisfied.
I did it the other way round, became a professional student, then PhD student, then postdoc. Now that it's no longer very likely that I'll get tenure - for various reasons that mostly have nothing to do with my scientific performance - I'll have to spend time trying to get rich enough so I don't have to be a professional student any longer. I'll have to fund a company for the first time, while getting close to my 50s, and better earn some money with it.
I don't regret anything, the bottom-line of the story is just that it's hard to know in advance which strategy is better, and even afterwards you can never be sure. That's the problem with the counterfactual reasoning that is the basis of these kind of life decisions.
Sorry for the roadblocks it sounds like your career has hit.
I think I chose correctly - I'd only really enjoy a PhD if I were doing it as a member of the Leisured Aristocracy. I only regret not having entered that club, despite having worked through three software booms where everyone else with a compiler and powerpoint deck apparently got stinkin' rich.
I guess I don't see why it wouldnt always be optimal to try and gain financial independence first. That allows maximum flexibility and a time buffer to switch careers/industry if needed.
You know, just about every major university needs good IT people to run the place. Many offer free tuition as a perk of working there. For example, MIT is currently looking for a software developer:
Many do offer free tuition as a perk of working at them, but look very very closely, there's often a catch. I spent entirely too many years trying to find my way out of the maze created. They did a great job at leading me around by my nose for a long time, more fool I.
Not the OP, and it's definitely not my style, but some people really like taking classes. They love the environment and energy that a university life gives them. I've known one or two people who have spent decades just taking classes (and accumulating degrees).
This is really weird to me but to each their own. I think it's partially because of ADHD but I really hate doing HW/writing essays that I feel are useless, which tends to be pretty common in uni.
But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
It's a bit like ordering the chef's choice in a restaurant. Sure you might hate a piece and never come back, but you might also find new combinations of flavours that you start to love but looked tasteless.
Anyway how many of us haven't felt great because we can code and suddenly we are more logical? What happens when you suddenly start to study logic or even learn something extremely simple as
De Morgan's laws [1]?
PS. I would also say that good universities are very, very different from high school. When the professors say something, they've studied it for years so they use precise language and are strict in their teaching. Definitions mean everything for them and you can't just say language is fluid to score a point which seems popular nowadays.
PPS. University is free in my country, so I don't consider cost-effectiveness to get a job. Especially as it seems pretty much anyone can get a coding-gig (we had a hot-shot consultant from a very prestigious firm (if you have lived in US, you've heard of it) ask me why his CSV file wouldn't work in our software. He had just taken an Excel-file and renamed the file-ending to CSV instead of exporting it! He could code, it was just that his knowledge was very, very shallow. We where quite expensive too).
>But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
I really strongly disagree with this. Good learning is inherently pleasurable[1] and if it isn't then there's something wrong. If a subject doesn't feel like it has enough purpose, it's not worth taking. Your brain is a fairly good predictor of that, contrary to what school would lead you to believe.
I think overall you'd be way better off just learning the things that you want to learn, that are applicable to something you actually care about instead of taking a class and learning things your brain tells you are useless and you will probably never use. I haven't read it in depth but I think ultralearning is interesting for the learning-for-application approach.
I'm probably a bit biased though because I use incremental reading[2] and no matter how good university teaching is it just can't compare to learning by myself (with occasional help from an expert, rather than being handheld)
Do you limit this philosophy to adult education? Because for childhood education it seems totally off - I wonder how many kids wouldn't learn even basic multiplication because it wasn't pleasurable at the time. I wonder what literacy rates would be with such a hedonistic approach (I don't use hedonistic to disparage, but rather in its literal sense of engaging in a pursuit of pleasure).
I doubt it even makes sense for adult education - I don't enjoy learning JavaScript nearly as much as I enjoy C#, but I require both for my job. SQL was an afterthought at the time, but it's proven to be incredibly important. If I only did what made me happy my career would be incredibly limited.
That’s tech biaised perspective. For a lot of topics there isn’t much resources available online, or not of good quality enough to get started and for this university classes are really helpful. Moreover, university and using the internet are not mutually exclusive: a lot of universities offers remote degrees. Depending on the languages you speak it can be very cheap (French univ are around 400€/year + one travel for final exam).
While I'm fairly interested in tech things, I don't really have a tech background. Could you give me an example of topics with few resources online? The majority of subjects I can think of have good resources online, the only issue is navigating them as a beginner (which can be helped by finding some sort of mentor).
There are sites like MIT courseware that are completely free and allow online learning. Though of course, there are signaling benefits to online degrees.
That's interesting, can you point me to any good resources on remote degrees (especially MSc) from French universities? My brother really wants to do one part time but can't afford it.
Google is not a very good teacher for learning about stuff you didn't even know you didn't know about. Sure, it's not impossible on your own, but it's where formalized education excels.
University is also an excellent facility for making contacts in your field. Not every expert hangs out on Slack.
I would say because there are things that you can more effectively directly from others. It's easy to learn facts by yourself. It's more difficult to learn what they mean, or how to analyze them, or (sometimes) even how to pronounce the terms. (Side note: maybe this is why there are such great debates in the tech world about pronunciations...)
That's not to say you can't learn remotely, but rather than in many fields, it certainly helps to have a teacher/guide.
I think there's a huge difference between having a guide and being in university. Having a guide is really helpful but going to university for that benefit feels a bit misguided because you're stuck learning what other people think you should rather than what you could actually apply.
Teadrunk said it in another reply - peers. I really want to hang out around smart, curiosity-driven people who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge. I realize that describes a small subset of PhD candidates and professors, but I believe they exist.
A PhD is supposed to train you to formulate, grapple with, and solve novel problems that contribute to the progress of the chosen field.
As well as prepare to train students in the future.
It’s a skill that cannot be learnt from books or lecture videos. You need intimate apprenticeship under an expert.
People are very different, and most can't learn more effectively by themselves. This is an approach that works well for some students and very poorly for the majority for whom a structured learning environment is pretty much a prerequisite for sustained progress.
People learn effectively in different ways. In my mid-30's, I've come to realize that I get the most from my time taking university classes to study robotics vs trying to learn it on my own. For me, I find the added pressure of a grade helps push me harder. As a younger person grades were annoying, but as an older person I just use the pressure to my own advantage.
While I do think a lot can be learned on your own, university in the traditional way gives you some things you might find useful:
- Peers that aren't just voices on an internet board
- Validation of the syllabus, and a sense of which parts are more important in the field. For instance, my econ tutor who was a famous Marxist didn't find it of high importance for me to study Marx.
- A timeline that is relatively inflexible. If you're in uni you need to learn how that proof works be the time of the exam, and you'll have to put off other things in your life. Outside of uni you can learn it today or when those things have happened.
The main benefits I would agree on are signaling and networking.
I am much less certain about the depending on university to force yourself to study things and being handheld by a prof/tutor.
Flagellation by university to get yourself to learn things is not a reliable long-term means of learning. I think it's far better (and I have had more success) when I learn for myself.
While there is some benefit in having a mentor, I think being handled and being told exactly what to learn isn't the most productive. A lot of times you'll end up learning really useless things as opposed to listening to your brain which generally has a decent grasp on figuring out what is worth learning to actually apply.
The statement "being told exactly what to learn" is so counter to my own university experience (admittedly almost 20 years ago now).
It seems to me that going to university to be told what to learn is counter to the actual goal of going to university, namely to have first-class access to resources (people resources, knowledge resources, laboratory resources) to pursue your own learning goals.
I've been tempted to go back to university in order to learn more about organic chemistry and chemical engineering, for instance. There's certainly a lot of information online, but a world-class chemistry lab with access to chemicals would be a great resource to have available to me, along with readily available mentors to help guide me when I have questions.
As for homework and essays, that sounds more like high school than university, from what I remember. It's always possible things have changed in the last 15 years, though.
That helps... my dream involves personal financial independence though. I'd want to study what I wanted without regard for what was publishable, whether I was tainting myself with the Cross-Disciplinary Death Scent, whether the people I worked with were cited enough, etc. In other words, a hobby PhD.
It's a ridiculous and selfish goal, somewhat like wanting to own a tropical island or talking about spending ten years sailing around the world.
When people talk about cheap or free, good-quality, higher education, the reason why it is so is because it is subsidized by the state. You usually have to meet several conditions to qualify.
Most universities don't let random students (foreign or domestic) come study for free. You either have to be really good or pay your way.
In all seriousness though, I can only think of one or two occasions personally where citizenship had an effect on a PhD admit decision, and in those cases the source of funding and external politics were the deciding factors.
At which point you need to decide whether you're going to devote years of your life learning Slovak from what's likely 0 to a professional level and then hope you get accepted into a university, or pay $ to study elsewhere.
Even if peers speak to you and some courses are offered in your preferred non-Slovak language, much of the world is inaccessible with a language barrier. You either go all in or look elsewhere.
Not true, there are plenty of foreign students everywhere in Europe with small languages and if the program is English they do just fine.
It really depends on the person. Some really cannot stand not understanding everything around them on the street, in the supermarket etc, others find it thrilling and a positive challenge to work through, they often take language courses in parallel to uni studies, but some never learn the local language and stick to international circles or English speaking locals.
There are many ways and tons of people do it to their satisfaction.
I wish you the best of luck. This is, quite honestly, the main reason why I wish to attain financial independence. I really would love to be a professional student, and my interests are all over the place, so I could keep it up for sure.
