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When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a year, they have to get jobs. The idea is to show them how awful the real world is, so they'll understand how lucky they are to be in college. This plan backfired with the guy who came to work for us, because he had more fun than he'd had in school, and made more that year from stock options than any of his professors did in salary. So instead of crawling back repentant at the end of the year, he took another year off and went to Europe. He did eventually graduate at about 26.

[3] Eric Raymond says the best metaphors for hackers are in set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.

Trevor Blackwell reminds you to take math classes intended for math majors. "'Math for engineers' classes sucked mightily. In fact any 'x for engineers' sucks, where x includes math, law, writing and visual design."

[4] Other highly recommended books: What is Mathematics?, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. And for those interested in graphic design, Byrne's Euclid.

[5] If you wanted to have the perfect life, the thing to do would be to go to grad school, secretly write your dissertation in the first year or two, and then just enjoy yourself for the next three years, dribbling out a chapter at a time. This prospect will make grad students' mouths water, but I know of no one who's had the discipline to pull it off.

[6] One professor friend says that 15-20% of the grad students they admit each year are "long shots." But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, except that no one on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations.

So if you want to get into grad school in the sciences, you need to go to college somewhere with real research professors. Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no matter how good you are.

Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts colleges are doomed. Most smart high school kids at least consider going into the sciences, even if they ultimately choose not to. Why go to a college that limits their options?

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Alex Lewin, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and several anonymous CS professors for reading drafts of this, and to the students whose questions began it.


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