[mechanical_fish]

Okay, I feel much better for you now. ;)

But I managed to simultaneously enjoy school a lot and learn to self-educate. These things aren't mutually exclusive by any means. All good education is self-education, and a good school is one that operates with this principle in mind: The teachers and the environment should amplify your self-educational tendencies, not thwart them.

Mind you, you'll never find a whole school, of any size, that works that well. (Especially in high school, and especially these days, when my understanding is that school is more regimented than ever.) You have to find the special corners.

You should take classes that help you. One rule is simply to study any subject that has a good teacher, no matter what it is: Ask around, find the teachers that are any good, and learn from them. Another rule, which I suggest often around here, is to take classes that incorporate resources that you won't find on your own. Guitars are easy to find on your own. Entire student symphony orchestras or choirs are harder to find, and fully-equipped semiconductor wafer fabs are the hardest of all to assemble in your garage, unless you're Bill Gates.

[firefoxman1]

Ah I do see your point now. Knowledge is easy to acquire nowadays, but the resources to pursue the knowledge further, to experiment, and materialize it into something useful are much harder to find outside of a classroom.

Also, I really appreciate your tips on how to get the most out of my college experience.

[JonnieCache]

The number one tip for learning lots of cool stuff at university: you don't have to be enrolled in a course to attend it. The tutors generally don't give a shit who you are or if you're meant to be there. Just turn up to whatever you want, it's fine.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and make friends with someone who has access to the Film Studies department's DVD collection. That, or hang around the door with an RFiD scanner. If you lack one of these, make your own.

EDIT2: By the way, I take no responsibility if the administrators at your educational institution are crazy and you get in trouble as a result of anything you may have read here.

[firefoxman1]

Haha that's awesome. I'm definitely going to try dropping into some classes (I kinda like breaking rules).

[droithomme]

Here's some money saving tips then. Most universities don't charge extra for taking crazy numbers of units as an undergrad, so rather than just drop in why not take 30 units a semester. A lot of undergrad survey courses have multiple choice exams and don't represent significant additional workload, but can be fun, the psych classes are also a place that will have pretty girls you don't find in engineering.

Dorms and school cafeteria food are expensive. But living off campus means commute time and parking expenses. Two options are to secretly rent a couch from someone living on campus, and to find a location on campus to stash a bedroll and just live there. Where I went to school there were carefully camouflaged dugouts in a canyon behind the physics building where there were about a dozen students living incognito for free.

[JonnieCache]

People at my university used to live in the woods, in tents. Some were known to construct multi-storey treehouses. Says a lot about the institution I attended. (It says it was full of hippies, rather than that it was expensive.)

Can't you just live on campus and cook your own food rather than eating at the cafeteria? Or are you forced to pay for the cafeteria as part of the package? I'm unfamiliar with the american system.

>Where I went to school there were carefully camouflaged dugouts in a canyon behind the physics building where there were about a dozen students living incognito for free.

That sounds awesome. This probably isn't correct, but when you say camoflaged dugouts, I'm thinking of an elaborate system of WWI style trenches, or perhaps that Al Queada cave complex that Dick Cheney saw in a fever dream. In my mind, it's like some kind of survivalist-nerd version of a frat house.

I doubt I would have been able to resist the temptation to forget my classes and concentrate on expanding my invisible canyon-based physics fortress. Who amongst us can honestly say that it has never been their dream to inhabit a secret underground base with a team of renegades?

[mechanical_fish]

There's room for disagreement, but I think it's not such a good idea to take 30 units per semester even if you can ace the exams.

It's like everything else involving time: The secret to life is not to work N hours per week, but to work (N/2) hours per week on the right things.

For example, courses with middling-to-poor teachers are just not worth your time: You can watch better lectures online, instead, or just read the textbooks out of the library. And on the flip side, if you find a course with an excellent teacher it's probably worth your time to take that course seriously: Do the readings or the labs, and if you're some sort of ungodly speed-reader do extra readings or labs in that course. (Ask the teacher what else you can do. They will fall over themselves to tell you. That is why they are excellent.)

And if all your courses require no brainpower you need more challenging courses. There are always more challenging courses. After all, even if you're some kind of super-genius who has taken every course and is now bored, you can always invent new courses.