Speedrun

In Australia, I managed to cut a year off my university studies by foregoing a Masters degree and pursuing an Honours degree instead. The usual route to the PhD was a 3 year Bachelors, 2 year Masters, and then into a PhD program. However, if you did a research intensive Honours year (50% coursework, 50% thesis) and managed to get something published in a peer-reviewed journal, you stood a good chance of going straight into a PhD program. For me, this allowed me to get a taste of research (if still at a sub-PhD level) and quickly learn what it means to move through peer-review in a journal. In my case, I think the ‘shortcut’ made sense and it paid off.

In the author’s case, it doesn’t seem clear ot me what the benefit to finishing early is. Perhaps a cost saving (community college courses are cheaper than a 4 year college?) but otherwise, why?

While I'm sure the author enjoyed their experience, she doesn't really explain why we should prefer "speedrunning" to the traditional timeline. It gets you into the workforce earlier? She never even makes clear that she accomplished the second goal she lays out at the beginning of the piece. Nothing about her optimization-dictated academic path indicates a particularly "illegible" or "unusual" life. To me, it actually slots in quite nicely with the now widely emergent hustle culture.

Notably, she doesn't discuss other people or social interaction at all minus couchsurfing "random internet friends" (a telling description of people you're ostensibly close with). What makes "travel" and "adventures" better than, say, living in a tight knit community for a few years, making very close friends by virtue of repeated, consistent interaction? I probably could have compressed my schooling as well, but I developed as much as a person academically during that time in my life because I made friends with people who were different than me, and had different life goals, which changed my perspective significantly.

I would also note that it's probably too early for her to actually assess in full what she's gained from the experience. She was in undergrad at UVA in the fall of 2022, which would make her at most 22 and only one year out of school assuming a normal two semester academic calendar.

I’d give people the opposite advice: take longer for your bachelors, masters, PhD. At least when you want to become a professional scientist.

The reason is simple: a semester extra in your bachelor does not really matter, but if you manage to publish a paper or do a lab visit at an elite institution this is highly visible and pays of for the rest of your career. Same goes for the master.

For the PhD it’s even smarter to take a bit longer: you’ll be judged by your publication list and the skills you have, not for the years, in addition many early career grants are for people working the first 7 years after their PhD.

For me there are only 2 reasons to rush your PhD: you are a genius and they want to give you a professor position, you need a higher salary.

I get a mixture of feelings from this.

On one hand, I respect the willfulness and wish I'd had that. I had ambition and hunger and brashness, but they really didn't get me as far as I might have thought.

On the other, I took a lot of classes, not because they were easy but because I wanted to explore some subject in good depth and wanted a guided tour. But I can't say I really put the effort into most of those classes that they deserved...

IDK. This was interesting, and a quick read. I'll send it to my kid, and I hope he'll read it, and I don't think I hope he'll follow the advice.

In a way, is the author advocating that the best way to get out of the rat race is to win at it?

Also, looks like the author is very different from the typical high school aged person. The author is clearly intelligent and highly motivated, they're also able to maintain good relationships with the people around them (teachers, internet friends, etc.), but if it was so easy, we would see more well-adjusted early graduates of the education system.

I think the last few years (probably longer, it's just more pronounced now) have shown us the social impact of lowering the time kids spend together, particularly at school. This person thinks that they've hacked the system, but in reality this all could have been achieved in most high quality school systems in the US (they say they were socialized into the "college rat race" so I assume they were in an area where this was the case). Kids in Maryland and Virginia public school systems are regularly in community college classes by senior year.

Amusingly, they have other pro-natalism writing where they argue for social reintegration. What a mess.

I studied mathematics for 4 years, and the idea that I, or anyone who wasn't already highly educated in mathematics, could have compressed it into three semesters and still come out with anything useful is just dumb. Same for many other degrees in science, engineering, or medicine. Even if you could maybe pass the exams you'd miss out on so much other important knowledge.

I could have compressed it into maybe three years instead of four, but then I would have missed out on all the other, equally important life experiences that college years bring:

- clubs and societies: I started and ran a society with some people who became close friends and this gave me invaluable experience in running an organization within the larger university. Impossible to compress or speedrun because most of it happens on other people's time (as do many important things in life). I also took part in all kinds of events from clubs and societies run by other people.

- competitions: I took part in a couple of teams based maths competitions. Didn't win but placed respectably, learned a lot about working with other people under pressure.

- friendships and loves: this is a huge part of college. Being part of a peer group going through similar things to you.

- partying! Damn, friend. Let loose and enjoy your college years. And the years afterwards. Go to a festival or two during the summer break. Enjoy the journey. Dance!

Life's more about the journey than the destination, since we all have the same one.

The point here seems to have been to obtain degrees as quickly as possible, without concern for actually learning. I'd also note that depending on where you're located and how far you're willing to go, there are often many other options, and high school can, I think, often be skipped entirely.

But even for students who do care about and enjoy classes, the idea of finding routes around parts of the process that are not beneficial can be useful. I didn't find secondary schools to be enjoyable or conducive to learning, and knew that I enjoyed community college classes much more; I found that in California I could simply test out of high school, and did so after seventh grade, instead going the guaranteed-admission route through community college. Then, at a university, knowing the system well, I aggressively avoided taking classes where I felt I would not learn much, mostly within my major's requirements: if I felt an upper division class with an equivalent graduate class would be boring, for example, I would swap them; when I felt I already knew anything I'd learn in the basic programming class required for physics majors, I successfully petitioned the department to have my research units, where I was programming extensively, cover the programming requirement. In part, this was not to finish faster, but so that I could take fewer, more rewarding classes and focus on them more intently, while also doing research.

I would say that I think guaranteed admission programs work very well in a wide variety of circumstances, and the stigma around them, and community colleges, seems quite unjustified. For students, they guarantee admission into often very strong universities with a process that is much more stable and reliable than standardized tests and arbitrary admissions decisions. They mean that the student takes lower-division classes that are much smaller and more personal than they would be at a major university, and takes them in a significantly more flexible setting where they often have fewer stresses. They can then transfer to a good university, going straight into mostly upper-division classes that will also be more personal, and where the benefit of the university's faculty will be more pronounced. And if they don't perform very well at the community college, they still have the ability to transition to getting an associate's degree, or to go to a lower-tier university. For universities interested in admitting students who will do well, it also seems beneficial: strong performance at a community college, an academic setting much closer to a university than to a high school, is likely a much stronger indicator of whether they will flourish in a university setting, and some pressure is taken off of large lower-division classes.

And for students who don't enjoy high school, I think that community colleges offer a compelling alternative: with their lower level courses, they essentially offer high-school-level material in the academic format of a university, with much more flexibility, less but more focused class time, less imposed work, and more reliance on students studying and learning in they ways they find best, or failing, with that failure being seen as the fault of the student rather than the instructor, meaning the instructor does not need to focus on forcing students to study. Despite the perception the author had of the route being for mediocre students, almost everyone I know who went through them were very good students, and chose that option either for its clear benefits or because they were in unusual circumstances: it was the process of choice for young undergraduates in California, for example, at least when I was a student.

I did always feel it odd that some relatives of mine looked down on the route, however. As a physicist, I'm not sure how many people even know or care where my bachelor's is from, much less where I started it.

[dead]