[dfield]

I cofounded Figma with the support of the Thiel Fellowship. It was definitely worth it to me, but dropping out of school is a very unique and personal decision. You should definitely apply and you should introspect deeply before taking it.

BTW, some of the statements on this thread that "fellows are used as poster children for Thiel's vision of society" and equating taking the fellowship to becoming a "living cog in his anti-education political statement" are just downright false.

I actually assumed going in that we would need to do press or something; after all, I've always heard "there's no free lunch." However, in reality I found the fellowship never pressured me to do media if it wasn't helpful for Figma. In fact, Figma was in stealth mode for the entire two year fellowship. There's literally no downside other than not attending school for two years. (And you can quit at any time to go back.)

If anyone has specific questions about the fellowship, feel free to reply and I'll try to answer later today.

[max_]

I am currently in my first year studying B.Architecture. But I want my lifes work(my core passion) to be around Software/Tech.

I enrolled to Arch school simply because I thought it was cool and did not do Computer Science cause the syllabus here is kind of out dated (they lack, an Artificial Intelligence module, something i want to get deeply into)

[elmin]

The vast majority of what you learn in a CS program was published in the 50-70s. Just because it's a little outdated doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn. Also, don't forget that you can always change schools, as hard as it might seem, it can be the right call.

[sammydavis]

One thing that modern CS programs should give you is more insight into the engineering and craftsmanship side of programming. Also, I think most of techniques we use to build distributed systems today were built way after the 90s. Think of the all the stuff google invented, plus other significant systems paxos, etc. In the 70s they were trying to build scalable relational databases, now we can build things that scale much more, and it's not just hardware, it is the techniques to handle them.

All that stuff might not matter if you are most startups, because they don't need to build that huge shit usually, you can just use someone else's infrastructure.

[semigroupoid]

The article introducing Paxos was first published in 1989.

[jonathan_mace]

I think he means the rise of commodity cluster computing, a la http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

[zachlatta]

Chiming in as another participant in the Thiel Fellowship who's had a similar experience. Dylan's spot on.