I see several people telling you to definitely choose a first rank university. I’m not sure I agree.
Here’s my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT’s waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmark’s multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my “career” than the MIT name or what I might have learned there.
So if you are someone who can use free time productively, you might want to consider going to a college where you don’t have to spend too much effort on your classes, where, face it, a lot of the stuff you learn will ultimately turn out to be not very useful for what you end up doing.
I endorse this but would modify this slightly: if you are someone who can use free time productively and who is unlikely to benefit from a community of intelligent and highly educated peers and mentors (for example, if your interests are narrow and not widely shared, or if you prefer to work on your own rather than consult others, or if you’re so many sigmas out on the right side of the bell curve that other people just slow you down, etc.), then that’s probably true.
If you’re able to benefit from the community, it can be a pretty compelling factor though.
I could definitely benefit from having a smart community around me.
Would professors be enough? All the colleges I’ve applied to have them (of course), but I’m a bit worried about accessibility.
All of the schools on my list have a form of honors colleges, so I’d expect to meet some people smarter than me wherever I go. Some schools more, some schools less. What’s the marginal utility of intelligent people in the community?
On the one hand, there’s only so many friends and acquaintances which I can keep track of at any particular time.
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of benefits come from having someone who’s smart and interested in the same things you are, and that most of the usefulness of a large community is in being able to have a lot of people who are smart and similarly-interested.
It’s not so much the “being surrounded by smart people,” in my experience (though that has certainly been one of the great blessings of my life), but the “if I am interested in X, I can easily find someone who is as smart as I am who has already spent some time thinking about something enough like X that i can pick their brains and quickly prune the tree of false starts.”
Professors can serve that role if you can engage with them, which some people are better at than others. I was bad at it as an undergrad, but I had peers who did it successfully.
That said, Wei_Dai’s point about using the Internet is a good one; I am old enough that that wasn’t quite an option in the same way it is now, and the modern world might really be importantly different in that way. (Can I just say how much I love living in the future?) This just might not be as much of an issue as it used to be.
In college I participated heavily on cypherpunks and extropians, so it’s possible to benefit from such communities without necessarily going to MIT or Harvard. Of course this depends on whether such online communities exist in the areas that atucker is or will be interested in, and how much he values physical vs. virtual social contact...
This is great advice for other people in the same situation.
I personally greatly prefer physical to virtual contact, at least for friendships. Not so sure about for general intellectual pursuits. Online communities have been great in terms of getting me to read things, but physical communities have so far been much more effective at getting me to actually do things other than read specific books, or write things.
I might be able to change this, maybe not. I haven’t particularly tried to.
I see several people telling you to definitely choose a first rank university. I’m not sure I agree.
Here’s my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT’s waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmark’s multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my “career” than the MIT name or what I might have learned there.
So if you are someone who can use free time productively, you might want to consider going to a college where you don’t have to spend too much effort on your classes, where, face it, a lot of the stuff you learn will ultimately turn out to be not very useful for what you end up doing.
I endorse this but would modify this slightly: if you are someone who can use free time productively and who is unlikely to benefit from a community of intelligent and highly educated peers and mentors (for example, if your interests are narrow and not widely shared, or if you prefer to work on your own rather than consult others, or if you’re so many sigmas out on the right side of the bell curve that other people just slow you down, etc.), then that’s probably true.
If you’re able to benefit from the community, it can be a pretty compelling factor though.
I could definitely benefit from having a smart community around me.
Would professors be enough? All the colleges I’ve applied to have them (of course), but I’m a bit worried about accessibility.
All of the schools on my list have a form of honors colleges, so I’d expect to meet some people smarter than me wherever I go. Some schools more, some schools less. What’s the marginal utility of intelligent people in the community?
On the one hand, there’s only so many friends and acquaintances which I can keep track of at any particular time.
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of benefits come from having someone who’s smart and interested in the same things you are, and that most of the usefulness of a large community is in being able to have a lot of people who are smart and similarly-interested.
It’s not so much the “being surrounded by smart people,” in my experience (though that has certainly been one of the great blessings of my life), but the “if I am interested in X, I can easily find someone who is as smart as I am who has already spent some time thinking about something enough like X that i can pick their brains and quickly prune the tree of false starts.”
Professors can serve that role if you can engage with them, which some people are better at than others. I was bad at it as an undergrad, but I had peers who did it successfully.
That said, Wei_Dai’s point about using the Internet is a good one; I am old enough that that wasn’t quite an option in the same way it is now, and the modern world might really be importantly different in that way. (Can I just say how much I love living in the future?) This just might not be as much of an issue as it used to be.
In college I participated heavily on cypherpunks and extropians, so it’s possible to benefit from such communities without necessarily going to MIT or Harvard. Of course this depends on whether such online communities exist in the areas that atucker is or will be interested in, and how much he values physical vs. virtual social contact...
This is great advice for other people in the same situation.
I personally greatly prefer physical to virtual contact, at least for friendships. Not so sure about for general intellectual pursuits. Online communities have been great in terms of getting me to read things, but physical communities have so far been much more effective at getting me to actually do things other than read specific books, or write things.
I might be able to change this, maybe not. I haven’t particularly tried to.