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Wow, I hate this advice. OP, if you are, like I was, completely repulsed by the constant insistence from everyone that you should go to college so you can toke, drink, party, and fuck: take heart, you can get a lot out of college without ever associating with meatheads and frat houses. The idiot carnival is not as prevalent as popular culture would have you believe; you can invest yourself into a hugely rewarding intellectual field, have excellent roommates that don't make you shove strange objects up your ass, and never even learn the name of your school's sports team, if that's more your style. Also: though it is certainly easy to do all of those things while racking up student loans or mooching the monetary equivalent of a new car off your parents, the implication that you can't do most of those things without (or after) college is simply wrong. I feel much more able to "do whatever I want" now that I'm out of college and successfully making money for a few years. I think college is important for the fundamentals it provides: data structures, mathematics, a vocabulary that helps you reason about (programming) problems. Exposure to concepts that you wouldn't otherwise know are useful. I met my wife in college too. But at the same time there's a lot that I think was both unavoidable and completely wasteful. On balance, I feel like I got a lot out of it, and I'm glad that I didn't let the people whose college experience was mainly about sex dissuade me from going. It is what you make of it. |