Ask HN: What a 2nd tier college student must do to be at par with the best?
I think I am in quite a similar position to you: after secondary school here in Ireland, I didn&#x27;t consider any universities outside of my home town (pretty much because I didn&#x27;t know a single person who was considering bigger and better options, so it genuinely didn&#x27;t cross my mind to apply to Stanford, CMU, MIT etc.) so I ended up going to a fairly average and not very well known university to study electronic engineering for my undergrad.<p>I went on an exchange for a year to UCLA and this was when I started to feel something similar to the sentiment you&#x27;re expressing here.<p>I&#x27;m now in my 3rd year of undergrad EE and for the last year I&#x27;ve been trying to fast track myself into the AI &#x2F; ML field as I&#x27;ve been increasingly regretting my EE major and becoming more and more interested and passionate about ML (particularly the intersection of ML, altruism and design): I got Norvig &amp; Russell&#x27;s textbook and read it in outside of my engineering classes, read less technical books like Nick Bostrom&#x27;s Superintelligence for motivation &#x2F; food for thought, made a simple collaborative filtering recommender system using the movielens open source dataset, moved away from the web dev stuff I&#x27;d been doing in 1st and 2nd year and tried to hone in on improving my algorithm and pure CS skills, watched a load of AI &#x2F; ML videos to try and get a better sense of who&#x27;s who, where&#x27;s where and what&#x27;s going on etc. in the field. The &quot;dream&quot; (I use that word loosely) is to do the google brain residency program instead of a PhD, or the U Chicago data science for social good fellowship, so I&#x27;ve been trying to figure out how to get myself into good shape for either of them.<p>It&#x27;s been overwhelming at times, largely because I feel like 1) I&#x27;m not in the &quot;right&quot; major, 2) I&#x27;ve had a taste of but no longer &quot;go to&quot; UCLA (or an equivalent high ranking university) and won&#x27;t be graduating from there so will need to work hard to stand out against the competition for placements &#x2F; fellowships &#x2F; internships 3) I don&#x27;t have mentors or peers who can help me navigate the field (I have a great relationship with a lot of my engineering professors but again, it&#x27;s not ML). So I&#x27;m sort of trying to make sense of it all myself. It&#x27;s reassuring to hear there are others feeling similarly and it&#x27;s great to hear all that you&#x27;re doing!<p>On a positive note, I suspect you may be overestimating the educational superiority of the top tier schools (I know I certainly did before I went to UCLA) but at the same time I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to completely disregard the big unis and just say &quot;circuit theory is circuit theory&quot; and forget about it. While I was there, I really didn&#x27;t notice all that much of a difference in terms of course content or even teaching quality - the biggest difference was there were an awful lot more high achiever students in my EE classes compared to in my home uni in Ireland, and there was a much more impressive &quot;career fair&quot; and internship opportunity scene than at home (think Irish Cement vs Hyperloop One).<p>You seem to be doing everything right. I think I was edging down a &quot;burnout&quot; path a couple of months ago with fretting over what you&#x27;re saying and over my own EE vs CS major &quot;challenge&quot;. I&#x27;ve tried to take a step back and remember that there&#x27;s no one enforcing a particular pace or path for me, hopefully you won&#x27;t let the fretting get in the way of your passion which almost happened to me.<p>Just wanted to comment this to warn you about the burnout thing, reassure you somewhat about top schools and throw in a few links you might find interesting for good measure!<p>You mightn&#x27;t find any of these links below helpful, you very well may be much more well read than myself but I thought I&#x27;d link these here anyway. The first is a reassuring AMA on reddit from the google brain team (particularly the comments where the team talk about all the different backgrounds everyone has at google brain). The second is a list of programmes, fellowships, resources and random AI &#x2F; ML related pages I&#x27;ve encountered in the last year (amongst a lot of other stuff ). The third is a playlist I made for a friend on interesting AI &#x2F; ML videos which you most likely will have seen before but you might just enjoy anyway. The quick interviews are cool if you haven&#x27;t seen them already.<p>Anyway - best of luck!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MachineLearning&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4w6tsv&#x2F;ama_we_are_the_google_brain_team_wed_love_to&#x2F;?utm_source=amp&amp;utm_medium=comment_header" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MachineLearning&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4w6tsv&#x2F;ama...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sharedli.st&#x2F;cvigoe40g9" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sharedli.st&#x2F;cvigoe40g9</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLxB_QX9z7BFSc7VRmy5ztmFzthfr96bmC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLxB_QX9z7BFSc7VRmy5zt...</a>