Why Indian students should attend college
In recent months, the number of posts extolling dropping out of college, or of people recounting their experiences (mostly positive, probably because the negatives won’t share) has increased substantially on Hacker News (I believe Steve Jobs effects on humanity extend here too). Meanwhile the The Story of Average Indian ‘Techie’, What’s your GPA? and other posts bring to the fore some things I do agree with:
- Most computer science curricula are outdated or just poor quality
- The majority of students are in it for the money
- The professors are almost always bad
In fact I didn’t particularly like most of my CS courses either. There were a few gems like System Software and Computer Networks at DA-IICT, but the rest were totally out of sync with the real world. So if you are a precocious hacker should you drop out of college in India? (Assuming your Indian parents will let you do that!)
NO!
Try your utmost to get into a good college with good infrastructure. Here is why you would want to do so. Not only is the infrastructure itself important, it also attracts the smartest people. Do well in college while improving your own skills and knowledge.
My reasons are based on personal experience, and in ways document some of my shortcomings too :P
Like minded people
Unlike the dense technological concentration of Silicon Valley, India doesn’t have technological hotspots. Even in Bangalore, very few people are passionate about technology and are hacking on open source software or launching startups (while this is pretty high in India terms, it is nothing in Bangalore terms). FOSS talent is instead concentrated in the students of engineering colleges. (I focus on FOSS because it’s a good way to filter out passionate people.) You will get to discuss problems, hack on code and be inspired by these people. A concentration of geeks also leads to geek events like hackathons. During various college fests there will be programming contests and so on. You’ll get to have fun. Finally there will be a lot of smart people doing things other than computer science. But they will be equally as passionate as you are, they will be liberal and forward looking and it will be a pleasure to interact with them. Oh and please don’t think of every person you approach as a potential future employer, employee or general networking and increasing contacts kind of person. Sometimes you (and certain people in the Valley too) just need friends. Face it, do you want to spend the next few years talking to your mom about why REST-ful APIs are the bomb or why this is funny?
Facilities
High-speed Internet access in India is still not too common, but colleges will usually have a great LAN setup, a lease line to the Internet and generally good connectivity. Use these to experiment with your peer-to-peer applications, host websites, or write the next great DDoS program (I’m not advocating this). That said they also may have ridiculously bureaucratic system administrators, censorship and the like. You just have to deal with in (and in some cases, circumvent).
Your college will also have a certain ‘relic from the past’ which is far more useful than any of our modern day, 140 characters technology. The library. Specific technology education is always best done via Internet, but general concepts and deep theory is still found in books. Use it well, you will regret the day you leave college and books will have to be purchased. (To overseas readers – there is hardly a public library system in India.) Oh, and do remember the fiction section.
Motivation and Persistence
When you are working on personal projects it’s very easy to give up or change tracks. You also tend to focus only on the things you like. College courses will force you to persist at subjects you don’t like, and keep you onto one thing for 3-4 months. Valuable lessons when your first commercial project is 90% done and you don’t want to polish it up because node.js just came along and is much more fun to play with. Do a great and challenging final project and end your education on a high note.
Find some other interests
Your life isn’t going to be just about CAP theorems, cache invalidation and naming your projects. You will have to interact with society. Take a humanities course. Learn to loosen up a bit — travel, listen to music and play sports. Waste time with friends once in a while. Don’t burn out before you’ve even started. Your whole life before 25 should not be spent being a workaholic. Sometimes I think the Valley propagates Minimum Viable Product, pitching to VCs and beer and pizza far too much. You don’t want to end up like this. You might also want to try some of these things.
So if you were thinking of dropping out, just give it a second thought. If you are still convinced you should drop out, do it. But please let me know at nsm.nikhil@gmail.com why you did so.